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Strategic plans for waste management require information on the current and future waste generation as a primary data source. Over the years, various approaches and methods for waste generation modeling have been presented and applied. This review provides a summary of the tasks that require information on waste generation that are most frequently handled in waste management. It is hypothesized that there is not currently a modeling approach universally suitable for forecasting any fraction of waste. It is also hypothesized that most models do not allow for modeling different scenarios of future development. Almost 360 publications were examined in detail, and all of the tracked attributes are included in the supplementary. A general step-by-step guide to waste generation forecasting, comprising data preparation, pre-processing, processing, and post-processing, was proposed. The problems that occurred in the individual steps were specified, and the authors’ recommendations for their solution were provided. A forecasting approach based on a short time series is presented, due to insufficient options of approaches for this problem. An approach is presented for creating projections of waste generation depending on the expected system changes. Researchers and stakeholders can use this document as a supporting material when deciding on a suitable approach to waste generation modeling or waste management plans.

Some engineering waste management tasks require a complete data sets of its production. However, these sets are not available in most cases. Whether they are not archiving at all or are unavailable for their sensitivity. This article deals with the issue of incomplete datasets at the microregional level. For estimates, the data from higher territorial units and additional information from the micro-region are used. The techniques used in this estimation are illustrated by an example in the field of waste management. In particular, it is an estimate of the amount of waste in individual municipalities. It is based on recorded waste production at district level and total waste management costs, which is available at a municipal level. To estimate the waste production, combinations of linear regression models with random forest models were used, followed by correction by quadratic and nonlinear optimization models. Such task could be seen as a multivariate version of inverse prediction (or calibration) problem, which is not solvable analytically. To test this approach, data for 2010 - 2015 measured in the Czech Republic were used.