Waste and Environmental Policy

Massimiliano Mazzanti, Anna Montini, Massimiliano Mazzanti, Anna Montini

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134046515
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Business General

This research deals with the increasingly complex issues of waste generation, waste management and waste disposal that in less developed industrialised countries present diverse but critical concerns. It takes a socio-economic and policy-oriented perspective and provides empirical evidence at EU and regional level. The EU and Italy are taken as relevant case studies given the disparities in environmental performances between less and more developed areas.

The rich and various empirical evidence shows that a robust delinking between waste generation and economic growth is still not present, thus future policies should directly address the problem at the source by targeting waste generation in EU countries. Some structural factors like population density and urbanisation present themselves as relevant drivers of both waste management and landfill diversion. Nevertheless, economic and structural factors alone are not sufficient to improve waste performances. Though waste policies are to be redesigned by covering the entire area of waste management, some first signals of policy effectiveness are arising.

This work will be of most interest to those students of environmental economics and environmental sciences, as well as policy makers, waste utility managers and companies in the waste management sector.

Part I
Waste generation, waste management and waste disposal

Macroeconomic analyses of delinking and policy effectiveness

1
Delinking and environmental Kuznets curves for waste indicators in Europe

Evidence on municipal solid waste and packaging waste

Massimiliano Mazzanti and Roberto Zoboli

Decoupling or delinking, that is, improvements in environmental/resource indicators with respect to economic activity indicators, is increasingly used to evaluate progress in the use/conservation of natural and environmental resources. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is doing extensive work on decoupling indicators for reporting and policy evaluation purposes (OECD 2002).

Various decoupling or resource efficiency indicators are included in the European Environment Agency’s state-of-the-environment reports (EEA 2003a, b, c), and a few European countries started to include indicators of delinking in official analyses of environmental performance (DEFRA/DTI 2003). Some countries are considering the inclusion of delinking targets in their major environmental policies, and the US has adopted an emissions-intensity target in its climate policy.

Delinking trends in industrial materials and energy have been scrutinized in the advanced countries for several decades.¹ In the 1990s, research on delinking was extended to include air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including proposals for some stylized facts on the relationship between pollution and economic growth, which are encompassed in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), so called because of the similarity with Kuznets’s (1955) suggestions about long-run income distribution paths.² The EKC hypothesis, which is the natural extension of delinking analysis, is that, for many pollutants, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution. This hypothesis does not stems from a theoretical model, but arises from conceptual intuition, although some recent contributions show the extent to which the environmental Kuznets hypothesis may be included in formalized economic models.³ Despite increasing applied research, empirical evidence on emissions EKC remains ambiguous. Some pollutants, mainly those identified as having a regional/local impact, seem to show a turning point (TP) at certain levels of income; but there is a degree of consensus that some critical externalities, such as carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and waste flows, rise monotonically with income. At best, a relative delinking may take place (Stern 2004).⁴

Research on delinking and EKC is less developed in relation to materials and waste than to pollution and GHG emissions. Although work being done by the Wuppertal Institute and Eurostat is beginning to fill the gap in material flows indicators,⁵ the limited results for the waste sector are a problem from a policy perspective. EU policy thematic strategies on both resources and waste include reference to absolute and relative delinking-based indicators (European Commission 2003a, b). Since a decreasing ratio of material input with respect to an economic driver would suggest future reduced production of waste, delinking across the material-to-waste chain can be interpreted in terms of waste prevention, which is the stated priority of EU waste policy strategy, and which is being transposed in national legislation on waste in Europe. Following OECD (2002, 2003), waste prevention activities and policies can be monitored and evaluated using absolute or relative decoupling indicators, by addressing, in particular, the trends towards reduction at source, and reuse.⁶

This contribution is a first attempt to fill the gap by developing a quantitative analysis of delinking for two major waste flows, municipal and packaging waste, at European level. Our results indicate that European countries, characterized by high income levels and by a relatively long waste policy history, are at best experiencing relative delinking, with waste indicators increasing only slightly less than economic drivers. At European level, the elasticity of two major non-hazardous waste flows considered with respect to consumption is not significantly different from unity.

Next section discusses some conceptual and methodological issues related to delinking and EKC analysis, and reviews suggestions from the EKC empirical literature useful for analyses on waste. We then present the data sets on municipal and packaging waste and discuss key issues regarding EKC econometric analysis. Main empirical results deriving from panel data analysis at European level of different EKC specifications for waste are consequentially discussed. We end the chapter with some conclusions and policy implications.

Defining a framework for delinking analysis

The relations between delinking and EKC approaches, and some of the limitations of both, can be discussed within a simple IPAT model frame,⁷ which defines total impact I (waste production) as the (multiplicative) result of the impacts of population level (P), affluence (A) – measured by GDP per capita, and impact per unit of economic activity, that is, I/GDP, representing the technology of the system (T), thus I = P • A • T. This is an accounting identity aimed at decomposing the relative role of A, P, and T for an observed change of I, over time, and/or across countries.⁸

While the effects of P and A as drivers of I are clear, the exact meaning of T is less clear cut. It is an indicator of intensity, which measures how many units of Impact (natural resource consumption) are required by an economic system to produce one unit ($1) of GDP. As a technical coefficient representing the resource-use efficiency of the system (or, in the case of its reciprocal GDP/I, its resource productivity in terms of GDP), it is the most aggregate way to represent the average state of the technology of an economy, in terms of the Impact variable. Changes in T for a given GDP, reflect a combination of the shifts towards sectors with different resource intensities (from manufacturing to services), and the adoption/diffusion in a given economic structure, of techniques with different resource requirements (inter-fuel substitution in manufacturing). If T decreases over time, there is a gain in environmental efficiency or resource productivity, and T can be directly examined in delinking analysis. In being responsive to changes of the state of technology, which will also be influenced by markets and policy actions, T is the main control variable for the system. In a cross-country setting, the interpretation of T is less clear, but delinking can re-emerge as a negative relationship between I and the level of GDP or GDP/P.

In an IPAT framework, three aspects of delinking analysis and EKC analysis emerge.

Firstly, delinking analysis or the observation of T alone, can produce ambiguous suggestions. A decrease in the variable I over time is commonly defined as absolute decoupling, even though a decrease in I does not, in itself, represent a delinking process, as it says nothing about the role of economic drivers. An environmental Impact growing less (or diminishing more) than the economic drivers, that is, a decrease in T, is generally defined as relative delinking. Therefore, relative delinking might be strong, while absolute delinking might not occur (i.e. I is stable or increasing) if the increasing efficiency is not sufficient to compensate for the scale effect of other drivers. And in certain phases, the opposite may be true. Assuming a stable Population, a negative GDP trend can push down the Impact variable (absolute delinking), as was the case in most ex-communist European countries in the 1990s, while T, the Impact per unit of GDP, might be non-diminishing (no relative delinking) or might increase (relative re-linking) because the I-specific state of the technology is stationary or worsening. Therefore, a diminishing I is always a positive environmental signal, but it might not be the result of structural gains in the I-relevant technological efficiency; whereas delinking, that is, a diminishing T, is always the result of structural or technological change, but it does not allow us to claim the environment is improving unless the change in I is considered. Only joint analysis of the I and T dynamics will provide a sound basis for suggestions related to environmental performances.

Secondly, a delinking process, that is, a decreasing I, suggests that the economy is more efficient but, in itself, does not provide an explanation for what is driving the process. In its basic accounting formulation, the IPAT framework implicitly assumes that the drivers are all independent variables. However, the evidence on the dynamics of economic systems suggests that each driver, as well as the Impact, can be reciprocally interdependent through a network of direct/indirect causation. For example, evidence suggest that population dynamics (P) depend on GDP per capita (A), and vice versa to an extent.⁹ Similar relationships or inverse-causation effects also apply to T. Theory and evidence suggest that, in general, T can depend on GDP or GDP/P, and vice versa if T refers to a key resource such as energy. But we can also distinguish a relationship between changes in the P and I and T dynamics (Zoboli 1996). In particular, in a dynamic setting, I can be a driver of T, as the emergence of natural resources/environmental scarcity stimulates invention, innovation and diffusion of more efficient technologies through market mechanisms (changes in relative prices) and policy actions, including price-based and quantity-based economic instruments. The re-discovery of the Hicksian induced innovation hypothesis represents the attempt to capture the channels through which I influences T, while models that include endogenous technological change capture some of influences of both I and GDP on T. In fact, improvements in T for a specific I may also stem from general techno-economic changes, for example, dematerialization associated with information and communication technologies (ICT) diffusion, which are not captured by resource-specific induced innovation mechanisms and can be very different for given levels of GDP/P because of the different innovativeness of similar countries. In this case, a decrease in T can encompass micro and macro non-deterministic processes involving dynamic feedbacks, on which economics offers a still open set of interpretations.¹⁰

Thirdly, EKC analysis exactly addresses one/two of the above relationship, that is, between I and GDP or between T and GDP/P. It presents benefits and costs. Even though it may provide some empirical regularities, and has great heuristic value, it may not provide satisfactory economic explanations.¹¹ We recall that the EKC hypothesis is that the concentration/emission of a pollutant first increases with the economic driver, as a scale effect prevails, then starts to decrease more or less proportionally, thus it becomes de-linked from income due to a steady improvement in T. More specifically, the EKC hypothesis predicts that the environmental income elasticity decreases monotonically with income, and that eventually its sign changes from positive to negative thus defining a TP for the inverted U-shaped relationship. Here, we do not address the very different meanings of the various formulations of the EKC hypothesis, which range from a relationship between I and GDP to a relationship between T (I/GDP) and GDP/P. We simply note that if the relationship is between I and GDP, the EKC provides the same information as analysis of T. Furthermore, if I and GDP display an EKC, there should be also one between T and GDP because both P and GDP, with some exceptions, are increasing over the long run, and delinking must have occurred at some level of GDP. If, on the other hand, there is an EKC regarding T and GDP or GDP/P, this does not necessarily mean that I and GDP also show an EKC, because GDP and P might have pushed I m...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Waste generation, waste management and waste disposal: macroeconomic analyses of delinking and policy effectiveness
• PART II Waste generation, waste management and landfill diversion: policy-oriented and regionally based analyses from Italy