Section: Quest 3 - Household Waste Collection | BRITQuests - find your bioresources

In the third quest, You will discover the map with Household🏡 Waste Collection in Europe. You will learn the difference between different types of wastes and collection systems. This map contains huge amounts of data📚 about household waste collection within the several cities in Europe. We focused on the smaller region - Schleswig-Holstein together with Hamburg - in order to make some statistical analysis. Nevertheless, after these quests you should be able to do the same analysis within different regions of your choice as well😃.

Select activity Learnings

On the BRIT, the map with household biowaste collection in Europe contains different types of waste as well as different collection systems. Let’s go quickly through all of them.

Waste categories:

-Green waste: In the households, those are the wastes from gardens, like soil, flowers, grass. Just remember that green wastes from the streets, like branches and leaves from the first quest, are collected and managed differently than green waste from private gardens. It is due to the different content of those wastes.

-Food waste: food residues, can include both pre- and post-plate waste, which can be plant-based or animal-based, processed or unprocessed and partly avoidable or unavoidable.

-Biowaste: food waste and green waste together.

-Residual waste: Non-recyclable waste, which are not suitable for either glass, paper, plastic, nor the biowaste. In simple words, everything that cannot be recycled.

Collection systems:

-Door to door: the waste bins are placed directly outside or near each household for easy collection.

-On demand kerbside collection:

-Recycling centre: waste is taken to a facility managed by the municipality or a private entity, where citizens drop off their recyclables.

-Bring point: waste bins are located in public areas, which may be 500 meters or more from households, where residents take their waste.

-No separate collection: there is no special system in place for collecting certain types of waste.
Select activity Here, on the BRIT, on the details page, you find a...

Here, on the BRIT, on the details page, you find all the information about the collection systems that you just learned about and some additional statistics, which we will use later on.
Select activity Task 1 - Find your collection system

Task 1 - Find your collection system!🚚

Find the biowaste collection system in Your region.

Instruction for quest 3.1 by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)
Select activity As you’ve already learned, biowaste is a valuable ...

As you’ve already learned, biowaste is a valuable resource and at the same time, really hard to manage. To make use of its potential, biowaste needs to be collected separately from other waste types. Depending on the context it might also be desirable to further separate green waste and kicthen waste. It is important to keep impurities as low as possible. There are different ways to do the separate collection. In many cases, this involves a separate bin that is collected by the waste management company. Biodegradable plastic bags are sometimes used to increase separation of food waste from residual waste due to its convenience. However, at the same time biodegradable plastic bags can increase impurities due to the wrong distinction between normal and biodegradable ones. Moreover, biodegradability of those plastic bags is a controversial issue, which is still under the testing phase. Reflect whether or not biodegradable plastic bags should be recommended or forbidden?
Select activity Task 2 - Where are biodegradable plastic bags allowed?

Task 2 - Where are biodegradable plastic bags allowed?

Check the regions where it is allowable to throw out biodegradable plastic bags into the bins.

Hint: advanced filters😉.

Instruction for quest 3.2 by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)
Select activity You’ve learned during the first quests with trees ...

You’ve learned during the first quests with trees and greenhouses a lot about green waste separately. Now let’s move to the part with biowaste, where both, green waste and food waste are collected together.
Biowaste is valuable because it can be utilised for methane production in biogas plants. That’s why at the end of the 3rd quest you will study the spatial distribution of biowaste in the Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg regions to compare it later on with existing biogas plants.
Select activity Task 3 - Spatial distribution of biowaste in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg

Task 3 - Spatial distribution of biowaste in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg

Check the distribution of biowaste in the Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg region. Choose a year, for which there is the most data available. Calculate the amount of biowaste collected in tonnes for every district and total biowaste collected in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.

Hint: You don’t need to click on all districts of S-H to get the information. You can use the excel export. The data given in excel is “specific waste collected”, check the units. You want to have values in t/year.

Instruction for quest 3.3 by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)
Select activity After calculating the amount of biowaste produced ...

After calculating the amount of biowaste produced in every district, you will compare the amounts of biowaste collected with the capacity of the existing biogas plants. Take a look at the map and table below, representing biogas plants in S-H and Hamburg region and their capacity, calculate the overall capacity and try to do a quiz.

Biogas plants in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)

Approved annual total throughput of biogas plants by Ewa Wronka and Phillipp Lüssenhop (CC BY)
Select activity Quiz & Remarks

As You can see, even if it was possible to provide all of the biowaste from Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg region to the surrounding biogas plants, the number of wastes collected exceeds the sum of all biogas plant capacities. It means, if we want to put all the biowaste to the biogas plants, we need to create new ones?
Select activity Task 4 - New biogas plants?

Task 4 - New biogas plants?
Is it a good solution to build new biogas plants so that all of the biowaste could be managed there? If yes, where could they be built?
Select activity It is always a good solution to introduce biowaste...

It is always a good solution to introduce biowaste to biogas plants and produce biomethane, but actually have You considered that 40% of biowaste is avoidable? If we reached a perfect situation, a goal , where 40% of biowaste is reduced, we wouldn’t need that many biogas plants anymore. Avoidable biowaste is often kitchen residuals, food leftovers. If we, people, managed our food more reasonably and didn’t waste any food, 40% of total biowaste would be avoided. However, on the other hand, around 60% of the residual waste is also food waste. If we recycled the wastes in the right way, 60% of residual waste would go to biowaste. One situation decreases the amount of biowaste, the other increases.
Select activity Managing the bioresources is not only looking at t...

Managing the bioresources is not only looking at today's problems and investigating what we need in that specific moment. It is also looking in the past, watching the trend and trying to predict the future. What problems and what needs will be present in the future.

BRIT contains data from previous years. As you’ve seen with biowaste, the data was from 2015-2021. Nevertheless, remember that an increasing trend doesn’t mean that it’ll increase till infinity. It is important to take under consideration nowadays social, economic and environmental aspects to predict, manage and solve the problem.