Collection Before Combustion: Waste Composition, Energy Recovery and the Sequencing of Waste Infrastructure
Keywords:
Municipal Solid Waste, Waste-to-Energy, Calorific Value, Collection Coverage, Informal RecyclingAbstract
Waste-to-energy is widely proposed as the solution to municipal solid waste in rapidly urbanising countries, and it is usually proposed before the collection and separation systems that determine what a plant would burn. This study examines that sequencing. The method combines a structured review of research published between 2017 and 2024 with a synthesis of published composition and calorific data. Three findings follow. The dominant loss pathway in lower-income settings is uncollected waste rather than consumer behaviour: a global inventory across 50,702 municipalities estimates plastic waste emissions at 52.1 million tonnes annually, approximately 57 per cent of it open-burned, and finds littering dominant in the Global North while uncollected waste dominates the Global South. Composition makes combustion conditional rather than universal, since sampled waste in one African city was 80 per cent organic with a lower heating value of 6.12 megajoules per kilogram at 25 per cent moisture, and organic content in one Asian dumpsite fell from 70.5 per cent when fresh to 0.35 per cent after fifteen years with calorific value declining alongside it. And each upstream step alters the feedstock of the next, so a plant sized before collection, separation and organic diversion are settled has fixed its design feedstock before that feedstock is determined. The study proposes a five-step sequencing criterion and specifies what must be measured before thermal capacity is committed.References
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