MSW management in Romania: past, present and future situation

The amount of municipal and industrial waste, produced in the European countries has grown strongly in the last decades. The characterization of MSW together with their treatment represents an important instrument for local governments and sanitation operators in achieving targets for waste recycling and recovery by the year 2020, in order to achieve EU legislation requests. Romania entered into the EU (January 1st 2007), and began to re-organize its municipal solid waste (MSW) sector taking into account the EU principles regarding MSW prevention and reuse/recycling before final disposal. However, Romania has started to assimilate the parameters of a sustainable development under the special transitional conditions, which will influence the environmental protection activities after the Earth Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In this paper three scenarios regarding the situation on MSW management in Romania are reported taking into account the MSW composition and different solutions for their management: Past situation (case 1): all the MSW were sent to open dump; Current situation (case 2): selective collection activation and Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) with Solid Recovered Fuel production and the possibility to co-combustion in industrial plants or landfilling; Future situation (case 3): high selective collection and dedicated Waste to Energy option. The goal of these scenarios is to understand the evolution of MSW characteristics, their treatment and utilization in order to comply with recycling, reuse and valorization, and of course the last but with a very important aspect the landfilling minimization. The solution reported in this paper can be useful for many non-EU countries that are at the beginning with the MSW management planning optimization.