Alternatives for Future Waste Management in Denmark: Final Report of TopWaste

The TOPWASTE project has addressed the challenges of planning robust solutions for future waste management. The purpose was to identify economic and environmentally optimal solutions ‐ taking into account different scenarios for the development of the surrounding systems, such as the energy system. During the project, four decision support tools were developed:1. Frida ‐ The EPA's tool for forecasting future waste generation 2. OptiWaste ‐ a new tool for economic optimisation of investments and operation of the combined waste and energy system3. KISS ‐ a new lifecycle based model with focus on comparison of greenhouse gas emissions associated with different waste management alternatives 4. A new tool for techno‐economic modelling of central sorting plants.
The project has furthermore contributed with method development on evaluation of critical resources as well as analyses of economic and organisational factors with influence on the future waste management. The results of the project clearly show the importance of taking scenarios for the future development of surrounding systems into account when deciding how the future waste management should be, both when it comes to the economic, environmental and resource efficiency of waste management solutions. The following chapters addresses these issues by answering some of the main research questions of the project.