Waste & Recycling Economics: Collection Routes, Gate Fees, Sorting Recovery Rates, Material Prices, Residue Costs & Cost per Tonne

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn a week of collection rounds into hours, tonnes and cost per tonne collected, and pool the week correctly, so you know what each tonne costs before it even reaches a gate.
• Add haul cost to the gate fee of three fictional treatment sites, find the cheapest destination for each collection area with MIN and INDEX/MATCH and measure what the lowest gate fee alone would have cost.
• Blend two in-feed sources with different compositions into tonnes per material, add up the target streams with SUMPRODUCT, find their share of the in-feed and the largest stream.
• Apply recovery rates to the in-feed, add the contamination that ends up in each bale, grade every bale by purity with XLOOKUP and calculate the plant's overall recovery rate the right way.
• Value a year of bales at fictional prices and grade factors, total the revenue with SUMPRODUCT and test a weak fibre market as a scenario.
• Close the mass balance by calculating the residue left after the bales are sold, add the bales a buyer rejected, price the disposal and the rejects and express it all per tonne of in-feed.
• Build the sorting plant's yearly cost, find the net cost per tonne the gate fee has to cover, the result with the contract gate fee and the in-feed tonnes the plant needs to break even.
• Calculate the net result of four scenarios, express it per tonne, let a formula pick the best scenario and chart income and cost blocks side by side.