Context
For two years, Directive (EU) 2018/851 and Law 7/2022 have required municipalities to calculate the waste tax on the basis of the actual or estimated generation of each dwelling and activity, in accordance with the ‘polluter pays’ principle. However, many municipalities – especially those with fewer than 20 000 inhabitants – do not have reliable, up-to-date, or interconnected data. This shortcoming compromises the fairness of the system, local financial sustainability, and regulatory compliance.
Suma GT addresses this challenge by innovating an interoperable data ecosystem that reforms the previous system of dispersed and heterogeneous registers into personalised public services, tailored to the territory and end user. Designed for the subnational level, the project provides advanced capabilities such as georeferencing, GIS analysis, data curation, and indirect estimation, without requiring technology or specialised staff from municipalities.
By putting the user in the centre, the model adjusts the fee to the occupancy and actual use of each property, improves transparency, and reduces inequalities. Investment is made in equipping municipalities with a robust tool to make evidence-based decisions adapted to their territorial reality. Thus, data and artificial intelligence are no longer abstract and become a useful, fair, and understandable public tool.
Objectives
A critical issue was raised: most municipalities lack reliable, homogenous and geo-referenced data to enable the application of the new waste tax model required by Law 7/2022. The lack of connected registers, the obsolescence of information, and the lack of local technical capacities threaten the fairness of the system, legal certainty, and municipal financial sustainability.
Faced with this need, the project defines five strategic objectives, focusing on improving the user experience – citizens and municipalities – through an accurate, transparent, and territorially adapted public service:
- ensure regulatory compliance through a methodology based on objective data, aligned with the European ‘polluter pays’ principle;
- create a smart ecosystem of municipal data, integrating and georeferencing multiple databases to make them a single reliable source for decision-making;
- strengthen tax fairness, identifying omissions and inconsistencies, and estimating the potential generation of waste in each building;
- equip municipalities with advanced skills, offering GIS tools, analyses, and tariff scenarios without the need for local investment;
- provide user-centric services and modernise public management through a replicable, sustainable model geared towards continuous service improvement.
Implementation
The strategic implementation of this project provides an immediate response to the requirements of Law 7/2022, operating not merely as an isolated technological solution, but as a collaborative governance model designed to ensure regulatory compliance and long-term sustainability while relieving municipalities of complex technical and administrative burdens. At the core of this model are strong institutional alliances, with Suma serving as a centralised centre of competence that forges strategic arrangements with local authorities. This collaboration is rooted in the co-creation and territorial validation of data, ensuring that critical tariff decisions are precisely adapted to local realities through the direct involvement of municipalities in defining tax polygons and modelling tariff scenarios.
To support this structure without draining local resources, Suma completely absorbs the investments required for advanced technology and specialised talent – including experts in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and advanced analysis – thereby freeing municipalities from substantial operational costs. The entire project budget is borne directly by Suma as part of its annual capital investments, funding a dedicated five-person team responsible for the purification and integration of previously outdated and inconsistent databases. This operational staff successfully transforms scattered administrative records into high-value public geodata. Finally, the initiative maintains a transparent, two-way communication and stakeholder engagement strategy. The team presents complex technical results through clear, intuitive visual registrations and mapping data that facilitate highly informed local decision-making. This open approach allows both citizens and municipal authorities to clearly understand, verify, and rely on a fair, objective, and evidence-based tariff system.