PlastiCity scenarios and modelling: plastic waste collection in urban environments

Within the scope of PlastiCity, an Interreg2Seas project (2019-2022), a set of scenarios were developed for the collection of plastic waste in the urban environments of Ghent (Belgium), Douai (France), The Hague (The Netherlands), and Southend-on-Sea (UK). This included the exploration of alternative vehicles like CargoBikes and electro-vans, in comparison to conventional diesel-powered refuse collection vehicles. For each city, we developed an individual scenario and executed optimisations to compare different collection strategies and frequencies in terms of distance travelled, time used, as well as costs and emissions generated. We used OptiFlow, a logistics optimisation software made available by Conundra, a startup from Ghent University. The main challenge was the unavailability of realistic data on plastic waste volumes for different types of small and medium businesses and organisations in these urban environments, which was at least partially due to pandemic restrictions. Thus, our modelling is mostly to be understood as ways to explore different scenarios and constraints, such as a very limited loading capacity on CargoBikes.