Rethinking Municipal Tariff Systems to Improve Urban Waste Governance

The aim of the LIFE-REthinkWASTE project is to provide a governance scheme for municipalities to increase waste separation, reduction and recovery rates and to simultaneously reduce the waste bills of households.

The client

LIFE Programme – European Commision

Our role

2.-0 LCA leads the assessment of the life-cycle environmental, economic, and social impacts associated with innovative waste management solutions. Project completed January 2023.

The LIFE-REthinkWASTE project

The main objective of the LIFE-REthinkWASTE project is to endow municipalities with a “plug and play” governance scheme based on the PAYT (Pay As You Throw) and KAYT (Know As You Throw) paradigms to increase waste separation, reduce waste generation, and increase the effective recovery rates, whilst simultaneously reducing the average household waste bill. This objective will be tackled by adapting and re-addressing the waste management plans and other management/normative drivers (e.g., regulations, financial plans, and service contracts) according to a new paradigm in urban waste policy fares based on a combined approach of PAYT (supported by big data) and KAYT, and inspired by a novel social innovation approach.

A summary of the main results is available in this poster.