From 1 September 2026, households in Kontich, a municipality south of Antwerp in Belgium that also takes in the village of Waarloos, stopped putting plastic refuse bags out at the kerb. Residual waste now goes in a grey wheelie bin carrying an RFID chip, and the collection lorry identifies that bin and weighs its contents at the moment of the lift. What a household throws away, to the kilo, is what it pays for.
The scheme is run by IGEAN, the intermunicipal waste authority serving Kontich and neighbouring municipalities in the province of Antwerp. It is a diftar system, short for gedifferentieerd tarief, the Flemish term for pay as you throw, built on the principle that the polluter pays. Bags are no longer collected at all, and residents can exchange unused ones between 1 September and 30 November 2026.
How the identification and weighing works
A transponder is bonded into the body of each container, typically in a moulded pocket at the lip where the lifting comb engages. The tag carries a unique ID that the back office ties to one household account: in effect, the bin is the account. On the lorry, a reader antenna sits at the lifting arm. As the comb grips the bin and raises it the reader captures the ID, the on-board weighing system takes a gross reading, the bin is tipped, and a tare reading is taken on the way back down. The difference between the two is the mass presented, and it is written against the account that the tag identified.
Identification is what makes weight-based charging defensible. A weight on its own is just a number on a truck, and a household billed for someone else’s rubbish will not pay quietly, so read reliability here is a billing problem rather than a technical nicety. Where a tag fails to read the sensible answer is not to guess: the lift is flagged as an exception for the back office to resolve, and a damaged tag is replaced. A dropped read is a lost charge and a misread is a wrong bill.
Kontich also issues a chipped container for paper and cardboard, and that one is not weighed. It is a deliberate design choice. Paper is a stream the authority wants presented, so charging by mass would be perverse; the chip there verifies that the service was delivered to the address, allocates the flat fee and shows participation. The optional GFT container for organic waste is weighed, but priced well below residual waste. The same readers and load cells that produce an invoice also build a per-household record of how much residual waste each address presents and how often, which is the sharpest measure of sorting behaviour a waste authority can get.
What residents pay
The grey residual container is compulsory for every household, in 40 or 120 litre sizes allocated by household size, with 240 litre available on request. Paper and cardboard containers are optional at 120 or 240 litre and GFT containers at 40 or 120 litre, while properties where individual bins are impractical are served by shared underground containers. The charge has three parts, at the rates that applied from 1 January 2026 and indexed each 1 January against the health index.
- Monthly service cost: residual waste EUR 0.30 (40L), EUR 1.00 (120L), EUR 2.00 (240L); GFT EUR 0.15 (40L), EUR 0.50 (120L); paper and cardboard EUR 0.35 (120L), EUR 0.50 (240L).
- Cost per emptying: residual waste EUR 0.20 (40L), EUR 0.60 (120L), EUR 1.20 (240L); GFT EUR 0.20 (40L), EUR 0.60 (120L).
- Processing cost by weight: residual waste EUR 0.35 per kilo, GFT EUR 0.15 per kilo.
Charges come out of a prepaid balance rather than a bill in arrears. The prepayment is EUR 30 for a 40 litre residual container, EUR 50 for 120 litre and EUR 80 for 240 litre, EUR 20 for GFT, and EUR 4 or EUR 6 for a 120 or 240 litre paper container. Residents check what is left at mijnigean.be. Because the per-kilo element is the part they can influence, IGEAN’s bulletin for the switch pushes home composting as the obvious way to keep it down.
A proven model, not a pilot
Residual waste is collected fortnightly, and the first round under the new rules falls on Wednesday 2 September 2026, when only containers fitted with a chip will be emptied. The rollout ran through the year: letters proposing a container went out in February 2026, residents had until 1 March to request a different size or type through igean.mijncontainer.be, delivery dates were confirmed in May and distribution began on 1 June.
None of it is experimental. Chipped bin identification with on-board weighing has been routine municipal practice in Flanders and the Netherlands for years, and Kontich is adopting a proven model rather than trialling something new. It is a fair illustration of where RFID has ended up in this sector: high volume, unglamorous, and load-bearing for the money. More on identification in refuse and recycling collection is in the RFID News waste management section, and the wider picture in the environment section.
Read more at https://igean.be/sites/default/files/2026-01/Afvalkrant_diftar_Kontich.pdf
