Towards Quantification of Purchases and Waste Generation at the level of Individual Households: A pilot-study on Two Swedish Households

Sammanfattning: Continuous increase in resource demand and associated with it environmental impact, by-products and wastes,  are  going  to  put  strains  on  the  global  ecosystem  including  humans.  The  thesis  was  based  on  the assumption that: The household scale holds important information on flows of resources and statistical  relations between them. This master thesis was pilot-study of the project “Quantifying Household Metabolism” which was carried out by Urban Metabolism Research Group (UMRG) at Chalmers University of Technology. The thesis intends to develop methods to quantify fluxes of consumption and waste generation through individual household. The data was collected in two Swedish households and the collection period in the master project was 2.5 months on solid waste and 1 month on biowaste. The data was collected on a daily basis and from three streams: shopping receipts, recyclable solid waste and biowaste from kitchen. The data gathered by the proposed method illustrated a  pattern  of  consumption  and  waste  generation  through  individual  household  based  on  t h e   two  studied households. Although the proposed method avoided the errors happened in pervious study methods (Survey), the  deficiencies  and  potential  risks  exited.  The  indicators  developed  to  evaluate  the  situation  of  household metabolism  failed  to  apply  to  the  testing households  in pilot-study.  The applied data collection procedure was manual  and  laborious,  and  accumulated  errors  easily  happened  when  it  carry  out  in  a  long  term.  Several automatic possibilities could be introduced in the future study.