An Economic Analysis of Household Waste Management

An Economic Analysis of Mixing Wastes

“…Recycling in our model is fully observable and waste reduction through reuse is part of the formal economy. 11 By dropping the subsidy on recycling, t r , our model captures the result by Choe and Fraser (1999): if the government lacks an instrument to steer recycling explicitly, introducing effort destroys the benevolent effect of the deposit-refund system also in our model. This has been observed before by Shinkuma (2003) as well, who also demonstrated that the first-best can be achieved even if households have to exert significant effort.…”

“…At this point, it is also useful to compare our model with the results obtained by Choe and Fraser (1999), who were the first to introduce effort explicitly in a general equilibrium context. They point out that a simple Pigouvian policy that uses a tax on waste collection would be suboptimal if effort by households to reduce waste through reuse or composting were significant.…”

“…This insight also enables us to generalize Choe and Fraser's (1999) condition that the total costs of landfilling (including effort) must be smaller than the total costs of dumping for the household in order for dumping not to occur in equilibrium. In the presence of mixing and the absence of separate landfilling (lemma 3), this condition now reads: for the household, the total costs of landfilling mixed waste must be smaller than both the total costs of dumping mixed waste and the total costs of dumping each type of waste separately.…”

“…The role of effort in general equilibrium analysis of waste management has been studied in a seminal paper by Choe and Fraser (1999). Their model allows for -what they call -waste reduction effort by either firms in redesigning their products or households in reusing or composting their waste at home.…”

Municipal Waste Collection: Market Competition and the EU Policy

“…Most of the existing literature on MSW and its management has focused on either: (i) the environmental implications of waste and policies to correct welfare distortions (Davies and Massarutto, 2007). The closest contribution to ours is Choe and Fraser (1999). They also model the market for MSW but they focus on the environmental e¤ects of dumping and illegal disposal and on welfare enhancing policy intervention in the sector.…”