Modeling of municipal waste disposal rates during COVID-19 using separated waste fraction models

Municipal waste disposal behaviors in Regina, the capital city of Saskatchewan, Canada have significantly changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 7.5 year of waste disposal data at the Regina landfill was collected, verified, and consolidated. Four modeling approaches were examined to predict total waste disposal at the Regina landfill during the COVID-19 period, including (i) continuous total (Baseline), (ii) continuous fraction, (iii) truncated total, and (iv) truncated fraction. A single feature input recurrent neural network model was adopted for each approach. It is hypothesized that waste quantity modeling using different waste fractions and separate time series can better capture disposal behaviors of residents during the lockdown. Compared to the baseline approach, the use of waste fractions in modeling improves both result accuracy and precision. In general, the use of continuous time series over-predicted total waste disposal, especially when actual disposal rates were less than 50 t/day. Compared to the baseline approach, mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean square error (MSE) were reduced. The R value increased from 0.63 to 0.79. Comparing to the baseline, the truncated total and the truncated fraction approaches better captured the total waste disposal behaviors during the COVID-19 period, probably due to the periodicity of the weeklong data set. For both approaches, MAE and MAPE were lower than 70 and 22%, respectively. The model performance of the truncated fraction appears the best, with an MAPE of 19.8% and R value of 0.92. Results suggest the uses of waste fractions and separated time series are beneficial, especially if the input set is heavily skewed.