With a quantity of 250 million tons per year, corresponding to almost 10 % of all waste generated in the European Union, municipal waste plays an important role in EU waste management. In addition, municipal waste constitutes a major source of secondary raw materials due to its composition. In the first part of this master’s thesis, the composition and resource potential of mixed municipal waste, delivered to a Czech landfill site, was investigated by means of a practical sorting analysis. In order to determine frame and implementation conditions for the experiments of the project, the methodology of sorting analysis with its different approaches was investigated and adapted for the required application. For the assessment of the sorting results a comparison with other sorting analyses for the Czech Republic, but also for Austria was carried out. In the second part, data from literature and European databases were used to calculate the composition and annual resource potential for the waste fractions paper/cardboard, plastics, glass, metals and organics in municipal waste, for the EU as a whole as well as for all 28 individual Member States.