Institute for Sanitary Engineering, Water Quality and Solid Waste ...

Solid Waste Management SIA
waste prevention, recycling and waste treatment
in the EU-27.
put/output (I/O) balance of each stage is (dynamically)
linked to the others.
With this STREP proposal, sound experiences on resources
and waste management are combined in order
to give direct decision and policy support. The partnership
experience is mainly characterised by:
• European and National experience in policy support;
• The access to data from various countries (particularly
East and South);
• Availability of a successfully applied assessment
tool (NAMEA, MFA), along with more insight in
processes for various waste streams (AWAST simulator);
• An extensive network in resources and waste management.
The project aims at accounting for all sectors in the
economy (the figure below shows a possible conceptual
organisation of the system) the flows, stocks and
linked environmental pressures to increase the reliability
of source data used in “Life Cycle Approaches” to
waste management issues.
Waste policies influence the „primary production“ due
to recycling and prevention, the „manufacturing and
consumption“ stages due to recycling, reuse and prevention
and the „waste management“ sector. The in-
As an example, the following figure shows the situation
of sand and gravels in Austria. The net balance
between the consumption and the stock (104-10 Tg/
year) represent the net balance of the primary sector
(105-9 Tg/year), which means that the evolution of
this stock (age) is of primary importance for a policy
aiming at resources saving.
The difficulties of establishing that type of figure for
resources saving in Europe are at two levels:
• Data quality: considering the disparity of I/O country
data quality in the EU, it is anticipated to set
out a global mapping of materials cycles in three
steps: 1) elaboration of a global model for matter
balance applicable in all countries, 2) calculation
of the so-called “transfer coefficients” with “reliable
and complete” country data (four countries),
and 3) extension to EU-27 macro-economic data.
• Completeness: considering the variety of resources,
and eventually associated secondary resources
(as in ores), and their mixed occurrence in the
products, it will be necessary to combine the “materials
flows and stocks setting” approach with a
more global Input/output modelling for individual
countries and for EU.
Conceptual system description
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