Waste Management Scenario Design and Sustainability Assessment

Dear Colleagues,

The global solid waste production is expected to increase over the coming decades, to 1.4 billion tons by 2050. This significant growth poses a great risk of unfavorable levels of environmental impact, either due to waste flows not properly managed or due to an increased demand in infrastructure, equipment, and resources required to handle the waste. In order to decrease the share of waste management in the total impact of human activities, decision makers must find solutions to handle and recover waste, relying as much as possible on proper tools and methods to assure that waste management development will not lead to more environmental impact than benefits.

Scenario design and sustainability assessment of waste management are complex tasks due to the socio-technical aspect of this activity: it is composed of many processes and technologies and also different actors embedded in specific geographical, reglementary, societal, and economic contexts that do not allow for relevant one-size-fits-all solutions. This task becomes even more complex when accounting for the future evolution of society, as described in different prospective studies that analyzed different trends on socio-technical development in order to reach sustainability: technocentric versus frugal innovations and waste prevention, low-tech versus high-tech approaches, weak versus strong sustainability, etc.

Numerous approaches and methods exist, aiming at designing waste management scenarios and quantifying their performance at one or many stages of the waste management process. This Special Issue aims to provide an overview of such methods, with a particular focus on the ones that integrate socio-technical aspects relevant for waste management scenario design and/or sustainability assessment. Contributions are expected to either describe or propose a method, compare different methods, or apply a method to one or more case studies. Interdisciplinary contributions are particularly welcomed.

The contributions are expected to cover the themes listed below, but further scopes can be included if in line with the previously presented goal:

• Developing novel approaches or indicators to characterize waste management activities as a socio-technical system; 
• Developing novel methods or indicators to measure waste management sustainability;
• Coupling of quantitative or qualitative approaches to urban metabolism with waste management planning and assessment tools; 
• Assessment of prospective waste management scenarios taking into account contrasting socioeconomic pathways;
• Regional/local planning: regionalization, spatialization, and accounting for local specificities in waste management scenario design;
• Modeling and assessing waste prevention: status quo and state-of-the-art advances;
• Combination of life cycle-oriented tools to measure waste management sustainability (LCC, LCA, and Social LCA).

Dr. Valérie Laforest
Dr. Audrey Tanguy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Recycling is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• waste management
• scenario design
• sustainability assessment
• socioeconomic pathways
• socio-technical system
• decision support tool