Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A quantitative analysis of the US materials flow methodology and comparison to the EU methodology for MSW statistics

  • Technical Report
  • Published:
Waste Disposal & Sustainable Energy Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The European Union (EU) and the United States (US) determine municipal solid waste (MSW) statistics differently. The EU applies a site-specific methodology that directly measures waste whereas the US employs a materials flow methodology that estimates MSW statistics indirectly based on production and recovery data from industries. This study dissects the materials flow methodology and presents quantitative materials flow Sankey diagrams for the primary MSW materials to highlight data gaps that can be addressed to improve the methodology’s accuracy. Private industry plastics data were applied to the materials flow methodology, and the results were within 10% of the plastics statistics reported by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). Drawbacks to the methodologies include EU measurement inaccuracies due to double-counting and not accounting for residual waste in the US. The latter may partially explain why landfilling tonnages reported by the US EPA were approximately 60% less than the tonnages reported by the Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council (WTERT) in its national MSW survey that applied the EU methodology in the US. Unlike the EU, there is no US national policy that requires states to measure and report state-level waste data to the US EPA. Future improvements in US MSW statistics rely heavily on the implementation of national policies to homogenize the measurement and collection of waste data from states.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

Data of these analyses are avaialable upon request to the corresponding author.

References

  1. American Chemistry Council. 2016. ACC Resin Review 2016: Thermoplastic Resins.

  2. EREF. 2016. Municipal Solid Waste Management in the US: 2010 & 2013.

  3. Eurostat. 2013. Manual on Waste Statistics: A handbook for data collection waste generation and treatment, 3rd edition.

  4. Eurostat. 2017. Municipal Waste by Waste Management Operations, November 2017 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/metadata/en/env_wasmun_esms.htm

  5. Moore Recycling Associates. 2017. 2015 National Post-Consumer Non-Bottle Rigid Plastic Recycling Report.

  6. Moore Recycling Associates. 2017. 2015 National Post-Consumer Plastic Bag & Film Recycling Report.

  7. NAPCOR. 2018. Report on Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity in 2017.

  8. Shin Dolly. 2014. Generation and Disposition of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in the United States – A National Survey, WTERT-Columbia University.

  9. The Association of Plastics Recyclers. 2015 United States National Postconsumer Plastic Bottle Recycling Report.

  10. US EPA. 2015. Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Facts and Figures 2013.

  11. US EPA. 2014. Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures: A Methodology Document.

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors of this study would like to thank the United States Environmental Protection Agency team for their valuable insights and the American Chemistry Council for sharing industry data on plastics.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth Engineering Center, Department of Chemical Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Demetra Tsiamis & Marco J. Castaldi

  2. Dipartimento Di Energetica, Politecnico Di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Fabio Poretti & Stefano Consonni

Authors
  1. Demetra Tsiamis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Fabio Poretti
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Stefano Consonni
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Marco J. Castaldi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco J. Castaldi.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Tsiamis, D., Poretti, F., Consonni, S. et al. A quantitative analysis of the US materials flow methodology and comparison to the EU methodology for MSW statistics. Waste Dispos. Sustain. Energy 6, 85–94 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42768-023-00171-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42768-023-00171-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation