Waste Generation, Incineration and Landfill Diversion: De-Coupling Trends, Socio-Economic Drivers and Policy Effectiveness in the EU

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Waste generation and waste disposal are issues that are becoming increasingly prominent in the environmental arena both from a policy perspective and in the context of delinking analysis. Waste generation is still increasing proportionally with income, and economic and environmental costs associated to landfilling are also increasing. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of waste generation, incineration, recycling and landfill dynamics based on panel data for the EU25, to assess the effects of different drivers (economic, structural, policy) and the eventual differences between western and eastern EU countries. We show that for waste generation there is still no Waste Kuznets Curve (WKC) trend, although elasticity to income drivers appear lower than in the past. Landfill and other policy effects do not seem to provide backward incentives for waste prevention. Regarding landfill and incineration, the two trends, as expected, are respectively decreasing and increasing, with policy providing a strong driver. It demonstrates the effectiveness of policy even in this early stage of policy implementation. This is essential for an ex post evaluation of existing landfill and incineration directives. Eastern countries appear to perform generally quite well, thus benefiting from their EU membership and related policies in terms of environmental performances. We may conclude that although absolute delinking is far from being achieved for waste generation, there are first positive signals in favour of an increasing relative delinking for waste generation and average robust landfill diversion, and various evidence of a significant role of the EU waste policies implemented in the late 1990s and early 2000s on landfill diversion. Waste prevention is nevertheless the next necessary target of waste regulatory efforts. Terms of use: Documents in

Recovery of the Rare Metals from Various Waste Ashes with the Aid of Temperature and Ultrasound Irradiation Using Chelants

“…Due to the effectiveness of policy 3 Water, Air, & Soil Pollution, 225(9): 2112 The original publication is available at: http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s11270-014-2112-9 implementation, the trends of landfill and incineration for MSW processing are respectively decreasing and increasing in the high-income countries (Mazzanti & Zoboli 2008). The potential of waste ashes (viz., fly ash and bottom ash), a reaction by-product of the MSW incineration treatment, is anticipated as a secondary resource for rare metals, because the electronic wastes have become the foremost stream of MSW in recent years (Jung et al 2004, Babu et al 2007, Kim et al 2009, Ogunseitan et al 2009, Hossain et al 2012).…”

Comparison of end-of-life vehicles management in 31 European countries: A LMDI analysis

“…There were six countries with such data: Croatia (years 2006Malta (years 2006Malta (years -2009Malta (years , 2017Malta (years -2018; Slovenia (years 2015-2018); Iceland (years 2006, 2007 and 2018); Romania (years 2017-2018), and Liechtenstein (year To find the data for the variable describing waste generating activity (in this case, quantities of ELVs and parts of ELVs), we investigated the available statistical databases as that data had to be compatible and complete enough to be used in the model with data on ELVs. Furthermore, also based on the literature reviewed for the best explanatory variables in the case of waste generation, we chose household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) in millions of euros per capita (Korica et al, 2020;Mazzanti and Zoboli, 2008;Sun and Zhang, 2015;Xiao et al, 2021). As personal vehicles are very durable products, we chose to use final consumption aggregates by durability.…”

Illegal waste disposal: Enforcement actions and decentralized environmental policy

“…Population density is used to control for different anthropic pressures on the waste system. It is a common control variable in empirical waste studies (Mazzanti and Zoboli, 2009) and can be either positively or negatively correlated with waste management performances depending on factors such as economies of scale and land opportunity costs in urban and densely inhabited areas. Provincial value added, being positively correlated with income (for which provincial level data are not available), controls for structural differences among provinces, and is again a very common control variable in empirical analysis on waste management performances (see, among others, Mazzanti et al, 2012).…”

“…Waste is one of the most problematic challenges to sustainability. Though various improvements have occurred in waste management and disposal over the recent decades in most advanced countries, an effective absolute delinking between waste generation and economic growth/consumption has not been achieved for all relevant streams of waste, from urban waste to packaging to construction and demolition waste (Shinkuma and Managi, 2011;Mazzanti and Montini, 2009;Mazzanti and Zoboli, 2009;EEA, 2009). In addition, average national figures often hide rather heterogeneous regional performances (D'Amato et al, 2013) that might characterize 'hot spots', that is to say, failure of the economic, institutional and technological systems in findinga proper waste management and disposal equilibrium (D'Alisa et al, 2010).…”