Environmental and economic analyses of an innovative automatic system for sorting waste in public areas: case study of an airport

In the last decades the aviation sector has seen a rapid increase in the number of passengers transported all over the world, only stopped and temporarily reversed by the COVID-19 pandemic [1]. Among the waste generated by this sector, the municipal solid waste from the public areas of airport terminals (e.g. shops, check-in, restaurant, and café areas) is generally affected by a bad quality of the separate collection [2]. For this type of waste, a key aspect which contributes to a better management is passengers’ behaviour and awareness. Indeed, the waste collection quality is affected by people’s haste or negligence and by different familiarity with the waste collection system among the airport customers, i.e. people from various countries. With the recent advancement in artificial intelligence methods, there are now opportunities to make a difference by adopting smart technologies to improve the segregation of recyclable materials at the very beginning of the waste value chain. The idea behind these methods is to improve the waste sorting at the source of waste generation, thus leading to higher amounts and higher quality of recyclable materials. In this framework, this study aimed at exploring the environmental and economic effects of the implementation of an automatic system for sorting the municipal solid waste in public areas of airports focusing on Milano Malpensa as a case study.