The question about the directions of modernization or extension of sorting plants is justified, among others, by increasing amounts and changing structure of municipal waste in Poland. These changes are shown in the increasing amount and percentage of separately collected waste (plastics, metals, and paper). This occurrence overlaps with the deficiency of the required technological infrastructure essential, among others, for sorting waste. The deficiency manifests itself not only in the lack of proper installations but also in the inadequacy of existing sorting plants to current conditions.
Modernization of municipal waste sorting plants—the question about the direction
The law sets higher recovery, preparation for reuse, and recycling goals yearly. On January 1, 2025, however, they are introducing a deposit system that includes, among others, disposable plastic bottles and metal cans. Discussions on the model of the introduced Extended Producer Responsibility are also ongoing. The above laws and regulations are also challenges when it comes to changing the approach to waste sorting technology.
In turn, mixed waste is still the leading type demanding processing. Current changes do not justify removing this type of waste from the field of attention. On the contrary, the raw material potential is and will remain in mixed waste after the introduction of the deposit system.
Therefore, it is impossible to define the direction of modernization of the sorting plants without taking into account the space of such a modernization, that is, factors and changes in the environment. The process of modernization can be viewed from two perspectives: micro (individual businesses) and macro (on a national scale). Modernization, according to various definitions, is rather associated with updating, improving facilities, and so on. However, carrying out modernization involves making changes. The change itself might lead either to development or, if planned or introduced poorly, to regress. That is why defining criteria that will allow us to evaluate modernization as a desired change toward development is necessary. The attempt to answer such a complex question demands answering these two fundamental questions:
1. What factors determine or will determine directions of waste sorting plants’ modernization?
2. What criteria should determine the process of modernization?
No installation means real costs
Factors that influence directions of modernization may be divided into two categories: those that are a consequence of the changing environment and those individual, that are specific to the business or the condition of the installations. Additionally, various factors in the case of different communes, towns, cities, or specific businesses overlap in different ways and every time create a different, specific set of premises for the modernization of the sorting plant and directions of the modernization.
Firstly, attention should be paid to law changes and the national and European Union’s waste policies, which set goals and regulations in the field of waste management. For example, the unified system of separate collection of waste, introduced in Poland in 2013, has, over the course of 10 years, improved the efficiency of separate collection of, for instance, plastics and paper. However, the construction of adequate facilities for communal waste sorting, especially for selectively collected waste, has not kept pace with ongoing changes.
This problem is especially visible in big cities, where the amount of waste is significant and the deficiency of sorting plants is much more noticeable. No installation means not only the inability to process a specific waste stream, no recovery, but, above all, real costs related to caloric fraction management and lost benefits as a result of the inability to sell recovered raw material fractions. The economic and market value of a tone of recovered raw materials (the real cost of managing a caloric fraction, including lost value) is now around 2000 zl, excluding the value of the DCR (Documents Confirming Recycling).
Tightening requirements for waste management
The time in which the amount of waste increases (including waste collected selectively) and during which the requirements are tightened plays an important role. The European Union’s and national laws raise requirements for waste management. According to the 2018/851 directive, as early as next year (2025), 55% of municipal waste is to be prepared for recycling and reuse, 60% in 2030, and 65% in 2035. In accordance with the 2018/850 directive, by the end of 2025, a minimum of 65% by weight of all packaging waste is to be recycled, and by the end of 2030, this amount is to increase to 70%. In turn, according to the 2018/850 directive, by 2035, the amount of stored municipal waste is to be reduced to no more than 10% of the generated municipal waste. National regulations (that is, the “Act on Maintaining Cleanliness and Order in Municipalities”) additionally set intermediate goals such as limits on the amount of waste stored: in years 2025–2029, this is to be up to 30%; in years 2030–2034, up to 20%.
In the context of such difficult-to-achieve goals, the deficiency of required facilities is becoming more and more visible. The authors of “The National Waste Management Plan 2028” (passed in 2023 in June), estimating the demand for infrastructure, concluded that until 2034 in Poland should be built, among others, 230 new, additional, average-sized installations for automatic sorting of selectively collected waste.
The need for speeding up investments
From the state’s point of view, however, implementing the waste management goals into the national legal system and their inclusion in the plan for managing waste is not enough. It is essential to actively and properly prepare condition in order to achieve these goals. Foremost, it is needed to expand the infrastructure for thermal utilization and biological processing of waste. These two investment directions will have a significant impact on achieving the goals of minimizing the amount of stored waste and increasing municipal waste recycling. The expansion of infrastructure for thermal transformation of waste (heating industry) will directly affect the modernization’s directions, causing the need to expand facilities for preparing caloric fractions. Other actions must also be taken in order to achieve the goals mentioned above. These are: simplifying investment procedures; appropriately tailored project financing policy; adjustment of market conditions (Extended Producer Responsibility); and stimulation of the private sector. From January 2025, the deposit system, including disposable plastic bottles and metal cans, is to be introduced, with a planned minimum 77% collection level in 2025 and ultimately a minimum 90% in 2029 and in the following years. The introduction of the system will affect sorting plants users and have a negative impact on the profitability of sorting (a loss of valuable fractions). According to analyzes and estimates, this means that there will be a loss of several percentage points of PET in the morphology of the materials collected selectively, which will result in a change, significant for the technology, in the composition of waste delivered for sorting. Despite this, it is possible to create favorable conditions for investing in facilities for the private sector, and the key ones will be solutions related to the Extended Producer Responsibility system.
Analyzing the situation in which we are (the deficiency of infrastructure) and looking at the 2030–2035 perspective, we should already expect a sudden speeding up of investments, as part of the implementation of waste policy, in order to achieve the set goals.
The necessity to ensure profitability and greater intensity of sorting
The European Union’s law requires member states to achieve waste management goals. In turn, the Polish state entrusts these goals to municipalities. It is important, in the system of waste management, at the operational level, to notice two operating sectors: public and private. It is also significant, in the context of such ambitious goals, to direct both sectors towards achieving the goals. Furthermore, it should be noticed that the private sector, due to its nature, is ready to finance the construction of waste sorting and processing infrastructure, involving its own resources, funds, and external financing options, which are often the ones municipalities are missing. In order to involve the private sector, it is essential to ensure profitability.
Achieving such ambitious goals will require more than just expanding the infrastructure. From a technological viewpoint, it will mean the need to focus on maximizing the recovery of raw materials contained in waste, an attempt to reach for every raw materials fraction and to maximize the effectiveness of the fraction’s recovery.
The modernization of plastic sorting plants and their expansion
Firstly, the priority will be the modernization and expansion of the infrastructure for sorting and recovering plastics, which is simpler to do with the engagement of the private sector. The plastics sorting technology is specific because plastics have low density, large volume, and a high share of valuable raw materials fractions (at an average level of 40–60% of their content in the plastics stream). Processing plastics has an important economic dimension, due to a lack of sorting and recovery, fractions generate high costs in further management. In turn, recovered raw materials happen to be a significant source of income. This is one of the factors, especially visible currently, which affects directions of sorting plants modernization, or more extensively – the modernization of infrastructure meant for municipal waste in the large scale. This might be the factor driving investments in the private sector, which should be utilized. The condition to achieve this is, especially in the context of the introduced deposit system on plastic bottles (PET) and metal cans (ALU), an appropriately adapted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system. While in Poland funding of municipal budgets from this system is promoted, in the Czech Republic funds from EPR will be transferred to installations, in which the recovery is done, which is equivalent to motivating individual installations (public and private) to activities and investments focused on the recovery of raw materials, especially from plastics, for which the subsidy (in 2024) sets between 3600-13500 Czech crowns, that is, 145-545 euros per ton, depending on the type of material and other factors. What is more, the Czech EPR system rewards both receiving selectively collected waste for processing (the subsidy is around 45 euros for every ton received) and also preparing the residue as a caloric fraction for thermal usage.
Funds from EPR — for municipalities or for installations?
Due to the introduction of the deposit system, the cost of losing raw materials directly concerns installations, not municipalities. When the EPR funds go to the budgets of municipalities and not to installations, the installations’ economic conditions of operations and investment, because of the introduction of the deposit system, will significantly worsen. This will especially impact installations of the private sector, but over a longer period of time, as a result of the notable weakening of the private sector, the, widely understood, public sector will bear a much greater burden; construction and modernization of installations costs. This will not, in turn, “maintain prices for residents”, which is how supporters of this solution justify directing EPR funds to municipalities.
The situation with co-financing for investments in terms of modernizing the waste plant seems similar to the EPR situation. While in Poland, co-financing is available almost exclusively for the public sector, in the Czech Republic, private entities can also apply for financing. Making the financing available for the private sector in the future might be a notable factor supporting the process of modernization the waste sorting plant and Polish waste treatment infrastructure.
We should expect more technologically advanced sorting plants
Achieving high recovery levels will also require recovering raw materials fractions from mixed waste. The amount of mixed waste is still dominant, and the content of raw materials fractions is at an average level of 5–10%, which may seem like a small amount. To put it very simply, you can tell that the larger the municipality (city), the higher the content of raw materials fractions in mixed waste. However, if the average sized sorting plant receives, for example, 40,000 Mg/year of mixed waste with a raw materials recovery potential of around 7-8%, and 8,000 Mg/years of plastics with the recovery potential of around 50%, then the total amount of raw materials fractions to be recovered will be around 7.000 Mg/year. In turn, the part of raw materials fractions from mixed waste (40.000 x 7.5% = 3000) will be the vast majority, because this part amounts to over 40% of the whole recovered fractions from both streams of waste. Obviously, such calculations will be different in each case because the structure of the delivered waste and the waste’s morphological composition, which also depends on many factors, are different. However, the conclusion is as follows: mixed waste consists of a large amount of raw materials that are to be recovered.
In the context of performed analyzes and the level of technological advancement of sorting plants in Poland, one more conclusion comes to mind. With such ambitious set goals concerning waste reusing and recycling, we should expect even more technologically advanced sorting plants. The level of raw materials’ recovery around 50–80% might not be enough.
