An Oman recycling project starts with a feedstock map

The map is built around ownership and control rather than around tonnage, because ownership is what determines availability.

For each material stream, the map identifies the owner — the party who currently controls the material and can decide what happens to it. That may be a household, a business, a municipality, a waste management contractor, or a processor who already handles it. The owner's incentives determine whether the material can be obtained, and those incentives vary: some owners pay to have material removed, some sell it, and some are contracted to deliver it to a specific destination.

The collection route is the second line. How does the material physically move from where it arises to where it is processed? A route that exists is different from a route that could be established, and a route that serves one area may not serve another at a viable cost.

Seasonality is the third, and it is easy to overlook. Material arising can vary substantially by season — tourism, agriculture, construction and climate all affect what is generated and when. A project modelled on annual average tonnage may find that the material arrives unevenly, requiring storage, working capital and capacity that the average conceals.

Polymer and material composition, contamination levels and current quality determine what the material can be processed into and at what yield. Document ownership is the formal record: contracts, licences and arrangements that constrain who may handle the material and on what terms.

Movements and competing sinks complete the map. Where does the material go today, and what happens to it there? Material already flowing to a processor, an exporter, or a manufacturer who uses it as input is committed. A new project competing for it must displace an existing arrangement, which requires a better offer — not merely an available tonnage.

The map produces a specific number that a national estimate cannot: the minimum viable catchment, which is the smallest geographic area from which enough material can be drawn, at a haul distance the economics can bear, to support the plant.

This is a combined constraint. A plant of a given scale needs a given input volume. Material is dispersed, and collecting it costs money that rises with distance and falls with density. The catchment that works is the one where the volume available within an economically viable haul distance meets the plant's requirement — and it may be considerably smaller or larger than the project's initial assumption.

Working out the catchment is what makes the plan concrete. It establishes where the plant should be, how far collection must reach, what the transport cost will be, and whether the volume that exists within that radius is actually available. Where the answer is that it is not, the project's scale or location changes, and finding that out before committing capital is the point of the exercise.

Two boundaries should be stated. Nothing in this analysis assumes a guaranteed feedstock — availability is established by agreement with owners, not by an estimate of what exists. And nothing here addresses permits or approvals: those are matters for the competent authorities in the relevant jurisdiction, and a project must establish its own position with them rather than assume that a national direction implies an entitlement.

Building the map first changes the project in several ways. It replaces an assumed input volume with a specific set of arrangements that must be secured, each with an owner and a term. It surfaces the competing sinks early, so that the commercial work of displacing or partnering with them is done before capital is committed rather than after.

It also makes the project's risk visible in a useful form. A project dependent on a single large owner, or on a single collection route, has a concentration risk that belongs in the plan. A project drawing on many small owners has a different risk — the cost of aggregation — which also belongs in the plan. Either can be acceptable; neither is acceptable as an unexamined assumption.

And it sets up the offtake question correctly. A project that knows what material it can obtain, at what quality and in what volume, is in a position to specify its output and approach buyers. A project that has assumed its input is not, and will discover the gap when it tries to sell.