Do you remember the times when we all bought our flight tickets at a travel agency where we got the necessary documents, checked in at the airline counter with a friendly employee handing out boarding passes, and hopped onto the plane? Today, we spend hours searching for the best flight on the internet, preparing and printing the travel documents, and finally storing all the information in a safe place on a smartphone, hoping the phone battery will last until we pass the boarding gate. In those past times, we went to a bank to get money. We had the dairy man delivering milk and butter, the electric guy and the gas man reading the meters at least twice a year, and the beggar asking for some support once in a while. Today, we manage banking by using e-banking, we get the dairy products at the supermarket with self-checkout, we read the meter by ourselves, and we send the money to charities by a banking app. In those “good old days”, we had a service industry that was working for us. Today, it feels like we are working for a service industry. We are not just users of airlines, banks, milk producers or utilities anymore; we became their service providers, too. We donate our time – and also our data – taking over some of the service that in earlier days had been provided by them. The service industries on the other hand have succeeded in outsourcing more and more of their workload to consumers, thus cutting their own costs and responsibilities. How about the waste industry? What has the waste management sector, for example, waste collectors, waste recyclers, waste-to-energy companies and landfill operators, done to ease – or burden – the life of consumers during the past 50 years? The waste industry did an incredible job: they fulfilled the historical objective of waste management thoroughly, that is to remove all wastes from human habitats, thereby reducing diseases, rodents, pests and other nuisances. The service supplied was of immeasurable value: cities became clean, healthy, and livable, the waste was out of sight. The benefit of this service becomes evident when visiting a city without a modern waste management system, be it because of a strike, poverty, or war. However, the out-ofsight policy was not sustainable. It took only a few decades until smoking incinerators, leaking landfills, and polluting compost were bringing waste-related problems back to the agenda of the citizens. And again, this time pushed by environmental policy, the waste industry did its homework and invested massively in pollution abatement equipment and control. The flipside of the coin was the corresponding increase in waste management costs that have to be paid by the consumers. Thus, recycling came into the game: because of economic benefits, paper, glass, and metals have been separately collected and recycled for nearly a century. During the 1980s and 1990s, when consumers turned “green” and recyclers smelled the roast, the grand recycling scheme started, and separate waste collection turned into a religion: in one European capital, administrators made it mandatory to separately collect around 20 different waste items. The problem was that nobody knew it, not even the actors responsible for waste management. Today, many of us contribute to successful modern waste management by source separating waste. We provide space for safe storage of waste fractions in our homes, we clean used containers using tap water, we supply different waste categories to public and private collection points, we home-compost, etc. And in addition, we spend money for waste containers, bags, recycling bins, and home composters, etc. These activities are free of charge for those in the public and private sectors who manage a region’s waste. But for individual consumers, if calculated as opportunity costs, they are rather costly: in a comprehensive study about the optimization of waste management (Brunner et al., 2016), the authors conclude that more than half of the total macroeconomic costs of waste management are due to opportunity costs arising in consumer households. Activities such as separate collection and – particularly – repair and maintenance of household devices (that at least postpones the wasting of those items) demand substantial amounts of time, space and financial resources. Repair and maintenance are key issues when it comes to waste prevention (Bartl, 2014), one of the main objectives of waste management and resource conservation. Hence, in modern societies, consumers provide substantial uncompensated services to support waste management systems. The question arises: is this what consumers want (Broerse et al., 2014)? State-of-the-art societies with high gross domestic product are service oriented economies. Their citizens are highly educated and strive for enjoyment of the arts, cultural exchanges, and wellbeing. In their homes, they seek to experience a pleasant leisure time. They are not looking forward to rendering services for utilities, banks, phone companies, or to get involved in waste management. We are not living in the 20th century anymore when separate waste collection was a source of satisfaction for many citizens. We are now in the 21st century, when personal time is becoming the main resource which many of us do not want to misspend with waste handling matters. Thus, the challenge for future waste management is different and manifold:

中文翻译：

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用户——现代废物管理系统的受益者还是受害者？

你还记得我们都在旅行社买机票的时候，在那里我们拿到了必要的文件，在航空公司柜台办理登机手续，友好的工作人员分发登机牌，然后跳上飞机吗？今天，我们花费数小时在互联网上搜索最佳航班，准备和打印旅行证件，最后将所有信息存储在智能手机的安全位置，希望手机电池能持续到我们通过登机口。过去，我们去银行取钱。我们让奶牛送牛奶和黄油，电工和煤气工每年至少读两次表，乞丐偶尔会寻求一些支持。今天，我们通过电子银行管理银行业务，我们在超市通过自助结账获得乳制品，我们自己抄表，然后通过银行应用程序将钱发送给慈善机构。在那些“过去的美好时光”中，我们有一个为我们工作的服务行业。今天，感觉就像我们在为一个服务行业工作。我们不再只是航空公司、银行、牛奶生产商或公用事业的用户；我们也成为了他们的服务提供商。我们贡献了我们的时间——还有我们的数据——来接管他们早些时候提供的一些服务。另一方面，服务业成功地将越来越多的工作量外包给消费者，从而降低了自身的成本和责任。废品行业呢？废物管理部门有什么，例如废物收集者、废物回收者、废物转化能源公司和垃圾填埋场运营商，在过去的 50 年里，为了减轻或减轻消费者的生活负担？废物行业做了一件了不起的工作：他们彻底实现了废物管理的历史目标，即清除人类栖息地中的所有废物，从而减少疾病、啮齿动物、害虫和其他滋扰。所提供的服务具有不可估量的价值：城市变得干净、健康、宜居，垃圾消失不见。在访问一个没有现代废物管理系统的城市时，无论是因为罢工、贫困还是战争，这项服务的好处变得显而易见。然而，这种视而不见的政策是不可持续的。仅用了几十年，冒烟的焚化炉、泄漏的垃圾填埋场和污染的堆肥就将与废物相关的问题重新带回了公民的议事日程。再一次，这一次受到环境政策的推动，废物行业做了功课，并在污染减排设备和控制方面进行了大量投资。硬币的另一面是必须由消费者支付的废物管理成本的相应增加。于是，回收便应运而生：由于经济利益，近一个世纪以来，纸张、玻璃和金属被分别收集和回收利用。在 1980 年代和 1990 年代，当消费者变“绿色”并且回收商闻到烤肉的味道时，宏伟的回收计划开始了，垃圾分类收集变成了一种宗教：在一个欧洲首都，管理人员强制要求分别收集大约 20 种不同的垃圾. 问题是没人知道，甚至负责废物管理的参与者也不知道。今天，我们中的许多人通过源头分离废物为成功的现代废物管理做出了贡献。我们为在家中安全储存废物碎片提供空间，使用自来水清洁用过的容器，向公共和私人收集点提供不同类别的废物，我们进行家庭堆肥等。此外，我们还花钱购买废物容器、袋子、回收箱和家庭堆肥器等。这些活动对管理一个地区废物的公共和私营部门的人员是免费的。但对于个人消费者而言，如果按机会成本计算，它们的成本相当高：在一项关于优化废物管理的综合研究（Brunner 等，2016 年）中，作者得出结论，废物管理的宏观经济总成本的一半以上是由于消费者家庭产生的机会成本。诸如单独收集，尤其是家用设备的维修和维护（至少可以推迟这些物品的浪费）等活动需要大量的时间、空间和财政资源。维修和维护是废物预防的关键问题（Bartl，2014 年），废物管理和资源保护的主要目标之一。因此，在现代社会，消费者提供大量无偿服务来支持废物管理系统。问题出现了：这是消费者想要的吗（Broerse 等，2014）？国内生产总值高的先进社会是面向服务的经济体。他们的公民受过高等教育，并努力享受艺术、文化交流和福祉。在他们的家中，他们寻求体验愉快的休闲时光。他们并不期待为公用事业、银行、电话公司提供服务，也不期待参与废物管理。我们不再生活在 20 世纪，那时单独收集垃圾对许多公民来说是一种满足感。我们现在处于 21 世纪，当个人时间成为我们许多人不想浪费在废物处理事务上的主要资源时。因此，未来废物管理的挑战是不同的和多方面的：当个人时间成为我们许多人不想浪费在废物处理事务上的主要资源时。因此，未来废物管理的挑战是不同的和多方面的：当个人时间成为我们许多人不想浪费在废物处理事务上的主要资源时。因此，未来废物管理的挑战是不同的和多方面的：