Coordinated by the Hamburg University of Technology, these interviews are currently being conducted in 6 countries. The overall goal of the interviews is a description and evaluation of state-of-the-art and innovative waste collection systems considering the adaptability for decentralized schemes.
The interviews target experts in Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, Denmark and Germany and they include the identification of critical technical and socio-material factors for source-separation in households and commerce connected with new decentralized collection schemes. These experts come from several fields of expertise, such as policy actors, administrators, technicians and similar expert sources with critical insights and experiences in the field of investigation. While desktop studies provide sufficient data for an inventory on the commonly used waste collection systems, beyond that, especially the problems and challenges of the systems can only be investigated using specific insider knowledge.
Topics which are being investigated are technical biowaste collection procedures considering conventional systems (e.g. bins, bags, other vessels; door-to-door collection systems, bring systems) and innovative systems (e.g. kitchen shredders, waste presses, underground containers). In this investigations, a distinction between collection schemes for kitchen waste. digestible and hardly digestible green waste is made.
Overall, these interviews should help the project by determining the quality requirements for biowaste collection which are necessary so that materials can be used in the decentralised AD facility or eventually solid-state fermentation directly.
The results of the interviews will be made available in a report to be published in September 2017.
