Benchmarking operational efficiency in waste collection: Discussion of current approaches and possible alternatives

Efficiency assessment and benchmarking are crucial for managing any organization. However, especially from a regulatory perspective, such efficiency assessment and benchmarking must be unbiased from context-specific issues and should provide an absolute rating, rather than a relative one. The current work reviews the approaches used for performance assessment and benchmarking waste collection services, revealing that the majority are biased and are not absolute, and proposes two alternative context-unbiased and absolute performance indicators, the collection capacity use (CCU) and the segregated waste collection efficiency (SWE). The proposed indicators were calculated for 246 utilities operating in Portugal. The utilities were then ranked accordingly, and their position was compared with the position attained using the equivalent performance indicators in the system currently in use by the Portuguese service regulator. The results reveal ranking differences of over 50 positions and illustrate how misleading the results from context-biased and relative metrics can be.