Benchmarking concept: "avoidance and recycling of municipal wastes"

Especially in Bavaria, the public waste management organisations entrusted with public waste disposal make an important contribution to waste prevention and recycling. Under the aspect of services of public interest, extensive measures to reduce disposal wastes have already been taken in the past, for example, in the form of waste advice and logistical and plant facilities for keeping waste fractions separate.

However, for some time the tasks of the public services have been under close scrutiny. In this context the Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment, Health and Consumer Protection) Bayerische Staatsministerium für Umwelt, Gesundheit und Verbraucherschutz) instructed bifa to develop a sound "benchmarking concept for the avoidance and recycling of municipal wastes".

Benchmarking concept

The measures in this area are a multilayered service bundle with specific basic conditions, so that ultimately no two waste management companies are the same. The benchmarking concept – drawn up with help and advice from the central Bavarian municipal associations, the Bavarian State Group of the Association of Municipal Waste Management and Town & City Environmental and Operational Services ("Verband kommunaler Abfallwirtschaft und Stadtreinigung im Verband kommunaler Unternehmen e. V." VKS im VKU, Landesgruppe Bayern), and the Association of Bavarian Disposal Companies ("Verband der Bayerischen Entsorgungsunternehmen e.V." - VBS) – takes this circumstance into account by primarily targeting the investigation on the "creation of information and transparency". If the individual waste management concepts are sufficiently comparable and suitable comparative data is available, best practice recommendations can be derived in the interests of cost and service optimisation.

Key indicator system

A central part of the investigation is a practical, hierarchically orientated key indicator system. Provided suitable data is available it includes differentiated individual indicators for subareas of companies or processes (e.g. specific costs for individual cost units such as biowaste, bulk waste, etc.) through to global indicators on the level of consideration of the whole company (e.g. total costs for waste prevention and recycling measures per resident and year).

The indicators are not only defined in relation to processes but also relate to the different service dimensions in which the public waste management organisations operate, such as "avoidance and recycling services", "costs", "waste charges" and "customer or resident benefits".

In this way opportunities open up for a balanced, multidimensional consideration of key indicators which, for example, cannot be achieved by pure comparison of charges.