This paper provides a detailed and comprehensive cost model for the economic assessment of solid waste
management systems. The model was based on the principles of Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and followed a
bottom-up calculation approach providing detailed cost items for all key technologies within modern
waste systems. All technologies were defined per tonne of waste input, and each cost item within a tech-
nology was characterised by both a technical and an economic parameter (for example amount and cost
of fuel related to waste collection), to ensure transparency, applicability and reproducibility. Cost items
were classified as: (1) budget costs, (2) transfers (for example taxes, subsidies and fees) and (3) external-
ity costs (for example damage or abatement costs related to emissions and disamenities). Technology
costs were obtained as the sum of all cost items (of the same type) within a specific technology, while
scenario costs were the sum of all technologies involved in a scenario. The cost model allows for the com-
pletion of three types of LCC: a Conventional LCC, for the assessment of financial costs, an Environmental
LCC, for the assessment of financial costs whose results are complemented by a Life Cycle Assessment
(LCA) for the same system, and a Societal LCC, for socio-economic assessments. Conventional and
Environmental LCCs includes budget costs and transfers, while Societal LCCs includes budget and exter-
nality costs. Critical aspects were found in the existing literature regarding the cost assessment of waste
management, namely system boundary equivalency, accounting for temporally distributed emissions
and impacts, inclusions of transfers, the internalisation of environmental impacts and the coverage of
shadow prices, and there was also significant confusion regarding terminology. The presented cost model
was implemented in two case study scenarios assessing the costs involved in the source segregation of
organic waste from 100,000 Danish households and the subsequent co-digestion of organic waste with
animal manure. Overall, source segregation resulted in higher financial costs than the alternative of incin-
erating the organic waste with the residual waste: 1.6 M€/year, of which 0.9 M€/year was costs for extra
bins and bags used by the households, 1.0 M€/year for extra collections and 0.3 M€/year saved on
incineration.