Economic efficiency of resource recovery—analysis of time-dependent changes on sustainability perception of waste management scenarios

Waste management systems are modelled to provide a public waste management service and need to be able to meet environmental sustainability requirements at a cost that is acceptable to system users/citizens. Overall environmental, economic, and/or socio-economic sustainability of waste management in previous publications is done through independent analyses and comparisons of obtained results or through multicriterial ranking of different alternatives where final results do not have a meaningful physical significance and cannot be interpreted independently. At the same time, those analysis either neglect time dependant changes by focusing on moment in time, or take into account changes in some timeframe changes but report only ranking focused single-score results, thus, results neglect time-dependent developments. All of these approaches are lacking some information needed for informed decision-making and/or are difficult to understand by wider groups of people. Thus, in this study, link between economic and environmental sustainability is analysed through newly defined single-score Economic Efficiency of Resource Recovery (EERR) index that shows the specific system cost for achieving identified resource recovery, while legislation based time dependent changes are taken into account through successive analyses for legislative most important years. This approach can be used for benchmarking the overall (environmental and economic) sustainability trends, while its graphical representation enables easier presentation of sustainability results and can be used for easier comparison of possible solutions and decision-making. The results show that the quality decision-making process needs to take into account the impact of expected changes on overall sustainability and evaluate how they will affect the actual perception of used technologies. In this context, it is shown that overall changes in sustainability, in comparison to the existing perception, can significantly change, depending on which technologies the system is based on.