A Study on the Municipal Waste Management Practices of European Union Countries

Abstract

Industrialization, increasingly crowded cities, and the change in consumption habits have caused municipal waste to be an important part of sustainable development. In this study, the practices of EU countries regarding municipal waste management were evaluated using clustering and data envelopment analysis (DEA). The data set for 2019 was collected from Eurostat and eight variables were identified for the analyses. In the first stage, 28 EU countries were divided into four groups using eight variables and EM algorithm. In the second stage, the efficiency scores of the 28 EU countries' recovery and recycling practices were calculated using DEA. A single input and three outputs were determined for the DEA, and the overall, technical, and scale efficiency values were determined using the output-oriented DEA models. The findings show that countries that are efficient in terms of recovery and recycling practices are in the first and second clusters.