## 4 Market Overview  
There are a few companies in the market of vacuum waste collection systems [22]. The Swedish company Envac developed the first automated system in the 1960s, and today has more than 1000 systems installed worldwide. The Spanish company Urban Refuse Development (previously part of the company Ros Roca) also has a wide spread of systems, mostly in Southern Europe. MariMatic (Finland) started with vacuum collection of industrial waste, and since 2010 has also been implementing systems in domestic buildings. Logiwaste (Sweden) was founded in 2006 and is specialised in the hospital sector, although they also work in the residential sector. Other companies such as Atreo (TransVac), Stream, Oppent, etc., are also in the market, but with a lower market share. According to ADEME [22], the costs of investment in stationary vacuum waste collection systems, excluding construction work and preliminary studies or tests, range from EUR 2.3 million to EUR 13.6 million. These costs vary significantly due to the size of the systems considered. The size of one vacuum waste collection system is adjusted according to the connected population, the number of inlets, the length of the network, and the number of waste fractions collected. The number of fractions collected has a big impact on the number of inlets, the cyclones used, and the number of containers. In the projects studied by ADEME, the average cost per meter of pipe was EUR 1000-3000, and the average cost per inlet was EUR 20,000-70,000. The average investment was 2400 EUR/dwelling and 835 EUR/inhabitant. A study carried out to evaluate the feasibility of AWCSs in Manhattan using existing transportation infrastructure [32; 33] stated that direct operating costs for the proposed pneumatic installations, including the container drag from the pneumatic terminal to the transfer station, would be 30% less than those for conventional manual/truck collection in the two cases. However, due to high initial capital costs, the cost of the pneumatic systems would be between 3.3 and 6.6 times higher than for conventional collection. The business model to be adopted depends a lot on the project and the company installing the vacuum waste collection system. Some contracts include day-to-day supervision of the system and maintenance (excluding the cleaning of the inlets and transporting of containers to the waste disposal sites), whereas others integrate the inlet cleaning and transporting of containers to the treatment sites. These different business models also impact the manpower needed to run the systems, which can vary from 1 FTE to 2.5-3 FTE; therefore, staff costs account for 25% to 80% of the total operating costs. The other important cost of such systems is electricity consumption. It is also interesting to highlight that the funding mechanisms for vacuum collection systems follow three models. In the first model, mostly used in France and Spain, the systems are owned by the local authorities; in this case, the final user pays the same as in other waste collection systems. In the second model, used in Sweden, the system is usually financed by the owners of the connected buildings, who pay the operating costs with an annual fee proportional to the dwelling surface. Finally, in the third model, used in Nordic countries and the UK, the systems are funded by private investors and the final user pays for it when buying the house; the operational costs may be paid via taxes to the municipality or via direct payment to a private manager. A summary of some representative systems is presented in Table 1. As can be seen, the first AWCS was built in New York in 1975, but it was not until 2002 that the second one was built in Barcelona and shortly after in Stockholm. The number of systems has been growing steadily since then at a rate of 2-3 systems per year.