Predicting Urban Textile Waste Generation: An Agent-Based and Panel Econometric Approach

The growing environmental impact of textile consumption has intensified the need for efficient post-consumer waste collection systems capable of supporting circular economy transitions. Designing effective logistics systems for textile waste is therefore crucial, and their proper dimensioning requires accurate forecasts of collected volumes. However, textile waste flows are highly heterogeneous and strongly influenced by behavioural factors, making reliable forecasting particularly challenging. This study investigates whether urban textile waste collection can be effectively predicted by combining stable bin-level heterogeneity with time-varying socio-spatial and behavioural indicators. Using panel data generated by a hybrid simulation model for the municipality of Parma, we implemented a fixed-effects econometric framework and compared its performance with traditional benchmarks, including seasonal means and Holt–Winters exponential smoothing. The results demonstrate that incorporating structural heterogeneity across collection points, together with behaviour-related dynamics, enhances prediction accuracy and significantly outperforms traditional univariate time-series approaches, both at the aggregate level (R2 ≈ 0.81) and at the bin level (MAE ≈ 25). These findings also support the robustness and generalizability of the proposed panel-data econometric framework, which shows strong potential for application in other urban settings characterized by similar structural and behavioural features.