- Urban plastic waste collection as a systemic infrastructure of the city
- Street, door-to-door, and mixed waste collection systems: a comparison of costs and quality of plastic flows
- The role of citizens in plastic collection: behaviors, disposal errors, and waste quality
- Plastic collection logistics: population density, territory and optimisation of service routes
- Single-material collection and advanced disposal systems: smart bins, sensors and DRS
- Industrial plastic waste collection: pre-consumer flows, supply contracts and cost structure
- Recurring contaminants and structural inefficiencies in plastic waste collection systems
- Plastic collection optimization models aimed at quality recycling and supply chain stability
From urban collection to industrial waste: how systems, logistics and citizen behaviour determine the quality of recycled plastic
Essay. Post-Consumer Plastic Recycling. Chapter 5: Collection of Plastic Waste. Organisational Models, Flow Quality and Impacts on the Recycling Value Chain
The collection of plastic waste represents the first operational phase of the industrial recycling value chain. It is here that, to a large extent, the quality of the material available for sorting, treatment and regranulation is determined. Unlike sorting technologies or transformation stages, collection is not an industrial process in the strict sense: it is a distributed, complex logistics activity, influenced by territorial, socio-economic, regulatory and behavioural variables. It is the link closest to the citizen and, at the same time, the most critical for the stability of the value chain.
Post-consumer plastics that reach sorting plants are never a homogeneous stream: they are the result of different collection systems, shaped by political decisions, infrastructure availability and models for financing services. Understanding the logic of urban collection therefore means analysing not only the available technology, but above all the organisational configuration that determines the quality of the waste entering the plants.
Urban collection as systemic infrastructure
Urban collection is the pivot of household plastic waste management. It is characterised by several structural features: it is capillary, involves the entire population, requires operational continuity and shows strong daily and seasonal variability. Plastic is a light, bulky material with a low specific weight: this implies high logistics costs and the need to optimise load density, the number of stops and vehicle routes.
The first element that affects urban collection is the method of disposal.
The three most widespread systems are:- kerbside collection with street containers
- door-to-door collection
- mixed systems, combining elements of the two models
Each configuration presents a different relationship between costs, flow quality and citizen participation. Kerbside collection offers lower costs per tonne collected, but generally results in greater qualitative variability: the presence of foreign fractions and organic contamination is higher, and opportunistic behaviour is more frequent. Door-to-door collection, by contrast, delivers higher average quality, with fewer contaminants and greater purity of the plastic stream, but it requires higher operating costs, more complex route planning and a more structured relationship with households......
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