Quantification of household waste diversion from landfill disposal by waste management practices

Abstract

The European Landfill Directive requires the phased reduction of biodegradable waste disposal to landfill. One option, with significant potential to divert biodegradable municipal waste from landfill, is to encourage householders to compost their organic waste at home and this approach is supported in principle by the UK Government. However, whilst the benefits of home composting are recognized, there is uncertainty about the actual quantitative effectiveness of this approach to biodegradable waste management and, currently, Local Authorities responsible for municipal waste disposal and recycling do not receive credit or recognition for promoting this activity in the UK. This project aims to quantify the amounts of waste diverted from landfill through home composting, and other household waste recycling methods, by measuring the effects of these practices on the quantity and composition of residual waste produced at the individual household level. An automatic weighing system was fitted to a refuse collection vehicle (RCV) to provide data on the waste arisings from 324 households in the urban Borough of Runnymede, West London. The households were allocated into four groups according to the waste management practices: home composting; home composting + kerbside recycling, kerbside recycling only and a control group who did not compost or participate in the kerbside recycling scheme. The RCV weight data were complemented by a detailed compositional analysis of residual waste collected from the households. This paper presents a summary and overview of the key results and outputs from the research programme.