Model for future waste generation

The research presented in this report is part of the effort to estimate future Swedish waste quantities in the research programme Towards Sustainable Waste Management. More specifically, we estimate future waste coefficients that are designed to be fed into EMEC, which describes the Swedish economy in terms of 26 industrial sectors, a public sector, and households. Production in the model of industry and public sector requires input of labour, capital, energy, and other commidities. With waste-intensity coefficients added to each production parameter in each sector, EMEC can calculate the future waste quantities generated in different economic scenarios. To produce the waste-intensity coefficients, we make a survey of the current Swedish waste statistics. For each waste category from each sector we estimate whether the quantity depends primarily on the production in the sector, on the inputs of commodities, on the depreciation of capital goods, or on the size of the workforce in the sector. We calculate current waste-intensity coefficients by dividing the waste quantities by the parameter(s) to which they are assigned. We also present five different scenarios to describe how the waste intensity can develop until the year 2030. As far as possible and when deemed to be relevant, we have set the industrial waste generation to depend on the use of a commodity or an energy carrier. The quantity of spent vehicles and most equipment is set to depend on the depreciation of capital goods. Some wastes have been allocated to the staff, for example household waste from business. The quantities of wastes from households have a similar approach where every waste category is assigned to a combination of 26 different commodities.