Keeping a dense, historic city clean is challenging. Limited space for waste containers, high visitor numbers, and changing consumption patterns are pushing traditional waste systems to their limits. At the same time, cities are expected to meet increasingly ambitious sustainability and circularity goals. Only by testing new technologies in real streets, with real users and real waste, can cities discover what truly works. Imagine waste collection guided by route planning, containers that predict when they will fill up, and real-time insights into waste hotspots. These tools have the potential to reduce movements, prevent overflowing bins and improve flows. That is precisely what the Living Lab Clean Inner City makes possible in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam’s historic center has all the challenges of urban waste management: limited space for containers, fragile quays, small houses and narrow streets, high visitor numbers, and thousands of restaurants and shops. Traditional collection systems are under increasing pressure, while the city’s circular ambitions demand a new approach: seeing waste not as a problem, but as a resource. So, keeping the city clean is more than emptying bins. It means managing food waste, packaging, behavior, logistics, and space, all at once.
That’s why AMS Institute, together with the municipality of Amsterdam and researchers from TU Delft and Wageningen University & Research, is experimenting in the Living Lab Clean Inner City. In these collaborations, the city itself becomes a testing ground for smarter ways to prevent waste, collect it efficiently, and transform it into valuable resources. Residents, entrepreneurs, municipal services, and researchers work side by side to develop solutions that start as local pilots but can scale citywide. In these pilots, waste is treated as a chain of decisions: what people throw away, where it ends up, how it is collected, and what happens afterward. By addressing the entire chain, from food scraps to logistics to data, the Living Lab Clean Inner City creates solutions that can be embedded in policy, practice, and daily life.
Urban Living Labs: Learning by Doing in the City
The Living Lab Clean Inner City unfolds in narrow streets, on quays, in neighborhood gardens, and around crowded takeaway shops. Urban Living Labs are built around a simple idea: complex urban problems cannot be solved from behind a desk. Solutions must be developed, tested, and adjusted in real-life environments, with real people. Michelle Molema and Christian Seidl are Urban Living Lab Coordinators from AMS Institute. They spend a lot of their time building those connections. “My role is to map all the stakeholders involved in waste management in the city centre and identify who needs to be involved in designing and implementing innovations”, Molema explains. “We analyze the gap between the current situation and the desired one and translate that into concrete pilots. Instead of delivering a finished solution, all stakeholders become partners in experimentation; designing prototypes, testing them with users, and gradually refining them until they are ready to scale.” Seidl: “That’s how the inner city of Amsterdam becomes a ‘living laboratory’: researchers, residents, entrepreneurs, tourists and municipal services work together to test new ways to prevent waste, collect it more efficiently, and understand what actually happens on the street. This approach ensures that innovations are not only technically smart, but also socially acceptable and ready to scale.”
Showcasing Circular and Smart Waste Innovations
AMS Institute welcomed several Managing Directors of City Waste Amsterdam for a firsthand look at how innovation, collaboration, and research come together to improve waste management in Amsterdam’s historic center. During a walk through the inner city, AMS Institute and involved researchers showcased several real-life experiments that demonstrate the Living Lab Clean Inner City's integrated approach. The visit offered a valuable exchange between the researchers, AMS Institute, and municipal management, reaffirming a shared commitment to making Amsterdam’s inner city cleaner, more circular, and more livable.
From Banana Peels to Better Soils
One of the challenges within the project is how to work towards circular processing of organic waste. Organic waste seems harmless: vegetable scraps, fruit peels, leftovers from dinner. Yet in Amsterdam, it represents 38% of all waste, and 95% of it is incinerated. Very inefficient: organic waste is wet and heavy, making it energy-intensive to burn, and its sheer volume already represents a substantial share of the waste collected from the city center. At the same time, many urban soils in Amsterdam are contaminated with heavy metals and lack nutrients. Researchers from Wageningen University & Research link these two issues: instead of sending organic waste to the incinerator, researchers explore how it can be processed locally into compost and used to regenerate urban soils. Compost can bind heavy metals and improve soil structure, turning waste into a tool for ecological repair.
“This project shows how waste management and urban soils are deeply entangled”, Kevin Lai explains. “By transforming organic waste into compost through community initiatives, we address waste inefficiency and soil degradation at the same time.” Two pilot locations have been identified: one garden near Amsterdam Central Station is dominated by commercial organic waste, and the other near the Nieuwmarkt incorporates mainly household waste. As we visit this last location during the tour across the inner city, the researchers showcase how low-tech, scalable composting systems are being designed, combining fermentation containers, shredders, and composting chambers. “The idea is not a single machine, but a network of neighborhood hubs, embedded in existing gardens and green spaces, and maintained with local communities”, says Josh Snow. The impact is tangible: fewer food scraps in street containers, less pest nuisance, reduced incineration, and healthier soil for trees and plants. And: circularity becomes visible in the neighborhood itself.
Designing for Better Behavior
Waste is not only about what we throw away, but how we do it. In the inner city, two behavioral problems stand out. The first is takeaway waste: paper bags, cups, napkins, and packaging from restaurants and snack bars. The second is the deposit system: bottles and cans with value often end up in regular bins, leading people to break them open to retrieve them, creating even more litter.
Researchers from TU Delft and Wageningen University & Research tackle both issues through design and behavioral science. They work directly with selected takeaway shops in the inner city, interview entrepreneurs, observe customers, and co-design interventions that make it easier and more appealing to dispose of waste properly. “Visitors can help keep Amsterdam clean, if we design the environment in a way that supports that choice”, researcher Nina te Groen (TUD). “Possible interventions range from subtle nudges in shop layouts to new visual cues and disposal points near entrances. The goal is to reduce litter and the amount of business waste that needs to be collected.” At the same time, Wageningen University & Research focuses on the deposit system. Using an ‘intervention tournament’, researchers test many different strategies in the same area, from markings and colors to sounds and signs, and compare what works best. Their work is grounded in the idea that cleaner streets encourage cooperation: when disorder decreases, people are more willing to follow rules and participate in solutions.
Rethinking How Waste Moves
Collecting waste in Amsterdam’s inner city is a logistical puzzle. Streets are narrow, quays are fragile, and underground space is limited. Heavy trucks are practical but disruptive, polluting, and often impractical. In multimodal waste logistics, researchers explore how waste can move through the city in different ways: by combining cargo bikes, light electric vehicles, trucks, and boats into coordinated systems. In a pilot from the municipality of Amsterdam in the ‘Negen Straatjes’ area, this approach is already tested in practice through ‘Afval op Afspraak’ (Waste on Appointment), focusing on the collection of organic waste (GFE) from households and restaurants. To do this, researchers from TU Delft are building mathematical models to determine which vehicles to use, when to dispatch them, how to route them, and how to transfer waste between modes. “We develop algorithms that can choose between bikes, boats, light electric vehicles, and trucks”, researcher Yahan Lu explains.
“The goal is to provide reliable service with fewer heavy vehicles and lower emissions. In practice, this could mean that a barge collects bulk waste from several neighborhoods and brings it to a transfer hub, while bikes and light electric vehicles handle the last mile in narrow streets. Trucks are reserved only for large volumes.”
Wageningen University & Research contributes in two ways. First, researchers develop models to design collection infrastructure. For the ‘Wallen’ area, mathematical models identified optimal locations for water-based waste hubs and temporary hubs (the ‘ratelaarsronde’), and tested scenarios with varying walking distances and waste compression. Second, a simulation tool enables policymakers to test scenarios before implementation. “Being able to predict the impacts of potential policy changes is crucial for selecting the most suitable options,” explains PhD candidate Weronika Sojka. “We aim to balance performance, feasibility, user comfort, and environmental impact. Because individual choices affect the wider system, citizens’ wellbeing is the core of our analysis.” To design these systems, these researchers work closely with the AMS Institute’s prototyping team. Together, these tools turn waste logistics into a flexible, adaptive system.
Seeing Waste Through AI-models
What the city still lacks is a consistent, data-driven overview of where misplaced waste appears, how it changes over time, and why it happens. That’s why researchers are working on an AI-driven monitoring system that analyses visual data (such as street-view images) to detect and classify waste in streets and canals. This system serves as the monitoring backbone of the Living Lab Clean Inner City, enabling before-and-after comparisons of interventions, smarter prioritization, more targeted cleaning services, and shared learning across projects. “We translate images into structured waste data”, explains researcher Yanning Qiu from Wageningen University & Research. “That means we can map hotspots, track trends, and link patterns to possible causes like human activity, weather, or urban design.”
“If Amsterdam wants to make use of AI, the city must create space for experimentation.” This key phrase from a recent opinion article in Het Parool captures a simple but powerful idea: AI can support route planning, predict container fill levels, and analyze waste separation. But only if cities allow real-world experimentation. And if we can make sure there is valuable data and input. Within the municipality and in the market, there are many existing systems and data. Everyone involved emphasizes the importance of exchanging data within the sometimes very restrictive privacy frameworks. In the meantime, researchers are designing new ways to collect and manage imagery at selected locations to support continuous monitoring and further analysis of flows and waste patterns. During our tour with the municipality across Living Labs in the inner city, for example, Geertje Neijmeijer from Roboat demonstrated a newly installed third camera with Sensorhubs, near Nieuwmarkt. “This enables us to live monitor Roboat’s traffic. Roboat is an autonomous vessel that navigates Amsterdam’s inner-city canals and can be used to construct a wide range of floating structures. As part of this project, we are conducting a feasibility study on autonomous waste collection in Amsterdam's city center.”
Across all challenges, the same philosophy holds: start small, test and develop within the real world, and scale what works. The result is not one invention, but a new way of working with waste as a resource, with citizens and entrepreneurs as co-designers, and with data and AI-monitoring systems as guides.
