Respirometry role in the MSW sector under the EU circular economy perspective

In 2015, EU published several documents concerning circular economy applied to municipal wastes. In this way the waste management scenario in 2030 is figured out. The goals are clearly quantified and ambitious (i.e.: the amount of wastes in landfill should not be over 15%). In this context, the present work aims to analyse the effects on the respirometry applied to solid matrix, developed to support some management problems in particular for municipal solid wastes. A critical analysis of the respirometric methods is discussed, to verify the adequacy with the actual scenario of waste management in the European context (for this evaluation the Italian case is used, where a couple of anomalies are present in the definition of respirometric methods and in the available models of respirometries). In particular, the needs of two contexts, clearly different concerning the efficiency of separated collection of solid waste, are taken into account: the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy), which recently reached the threshold of 80% of separated collection and the Sibiu County (Romania), which is following the path of Trento Province, with some years of delay. It is reliable that the Province of Trento will be able to satisfy the EU goal of 2030, while the County of Sibiu will reach in 2030 the actual performance of Trento Province. There are many implications due to this temporal difference: this work analyses all of them under the point of view of the role of respirometry. As example, for the Trento case, in 2030 respirometry will be: - Not relevant for the assessment of biological stability of wastes destined to landfill, since the extreme separation of organic waste (today around 90%) and green waste, together with sanitary waste (in future separately collected) will lead to the quasi-zero biological reactivity of urban solid waste - Relevant for the assessment of compost stability (presumably produced after anaerobic digestion) - Relevant for the assessment of refuse derived fuel (“CSS” in Italian) stability - Potentially relevant for the measurement of biological stability of digestate before its destination to the following maturation phase (in case of activation of anaerobic digestion). In this case, the actual respirometric techniques seem to be conditioned by the long time interval requested by the analysis In the case of Sibiu County, the probable necessity of a landfill pre-treatment process will open a discussion concerning which respirometric index should be considered (nowaday respirometry is still not used in that area). The critical analysis of the first part of the work will show how this aspect is managed in Italy with a lack of attention.