The challenge
The success of rolling out door-to-door collection at county scale opened up a new challenge: moving from a shared collection system to taxation also managed under shared criteria.
The project had to make it possible to:
- Define a specific, differentiated, non-deficit fee.
- Move from municipal to county-wide revenue collection.
- Set consistent fiscal criteria across the door-to-door municipalities.
- Link the charge to each user’s waste generation and participation.
- Properly differentiate household and commercial taxation.
- Guarantee consistency between the tax register, contribution elements and service data.
- Build an economic model comparable across municipalities with different starting fiscal positions.
The challenge wasn’t unifying tariffs. It was building a county-wide fiscal model that’s coherent, fair and economically sustainable.
Project development
The project began by analysing each municipality’s fiscal and economic situation before building the new county-wide model.
The work covered:
- Analysis of existing municipal fiscal ordinances.
- Review and structuring of household and economic-activity registers.
- Linking the register to the contribution-element codes.
- Identifying the installed volumes per fraction for commercial activities.
- Calculating the economic balance for each municipality.
- Building the county-wide economic balance.
- Separating household and commercial service costs.
- Defining a county-wide household fee.
- Defining a county-wide commercial fee.
- Modelling different participation and revenue hypotheses.
The goal was to have a single fiscal architecture across all the municipalities, built on a comparable economic and tax base.
Methodology
The methodology was structured in five steps:
1. Municipal fiscal diagnosis
Analysis of the ordinances, registers, charges and fiscal structures existing in each municipality.
2. Building the county-wide economic balance
Determining and breaking down household and commercial costs to establish the real financing need.
3. Standardising the calculation bases
Linking the register, contribution elements, installed capacities and participation data to build a common fiscal base.
4. Designing the tax structure
Defining two county-wide fees — household and commercial — with fixed and variable components adapted to each user type.
5. Modelling scenarios
Simulating different participation hypotheses to validate the impact on charges and revenue.
A methodology aimed at combining financial sufficiency, territorial consistency, tax fairness and incentive capacity.
Results
- Defining a county-wide fiscal model for the door-to-door municipalities.
- Building a shared tax structure based on consistent criteria.
- Differentiated determination of household and commercial service costs.
- Building a municipal and county-wide economic balance as the basis for the new fiscal system.
- Defining a county-wide household fee with a fixed and a variable part.
- Bringing in participation bands linked to residual waste, organic, packaging and recycling-centre use.
- Modelling different participation hypotheses to anticipate the effect on revenue.
- Defining a specific commercial fee linked to installed capacity per fraction.
- Bringing reinforcement collections in as a variable element of commercial taxation.
- Integrating the tax register, user identification and service data.
- Standardising fiscal criteria across municipalities with different starting positions.
- Creating a replicable, manageable county-wide revenue model run from a single administrative structure.
Conclusions
Jointly managing the collection service doesn’t necessarily mean having shared taxation. Building it requires connecting each municipality’s costs, the overall cost of the county service, the tax registers, the identification data, the installed capacities, and participation patterns.
The project makes it possible to move from multiple municipal fiscal structures to a single calculation framework, while still being able to differentiate the charge by actual service use.
The county becomes the scale for economic management, while generation and participation continue to determine the fiscal relationship with each individual user.
Lessons learned
- A county-wide fee needs a shared data base.
Standardising registers, identifiers and service information is a precondition for fiscal design. - Municipalities need to be made comparable before they can be unified.
Municipal balances make it possible to understand the different starting points before building the county-wide balance. - A shared fee doesn’t mean a single charge.
The model can share criteria while still differentiating contributions by participation, generation and user type. - Households and businesses need different fiscal bases.
Participation is a suitable variable for housing; installed capacity better approximates commercial generation. - The register is fiscal infrastructure.
Without a reliable link between taxpayers, contribution elements and service data, a robust pay-as-you-throw system isn’t possible. - Modelling becomes essential as scale grows.
Simulating different participation levels makes it possible to anticipate the impact on revenue and reduce the system’s economic risk. - County-level management makes it possible to share criteria and technical capacity.
- A shared fiscal framework supports territorial consistency and simplifies management without giving up differentiation between users.
- The census is tax infrastructure.
- Without a reliable link between taxpayers, contribution elements and service data, it is not possible to implement a robust pay-as-you-throw system.
- Modelling is essential as the scale increases.
- Simulating different levels of participation makes it possible to anticipate the impact on revenue collection and reduce the economic risk of the system.
- County-level management makes it possible to share criteria and technical capacity.
- A single tax framework facilitates territorial consistency and simplifies management without giving up differentiation between users.