An efficiency analysis of municipal solid waste collection in Italy between 2010 and 2019

Abstract

This paper presents an efficiency analysis of the collection of municipal solid waste in Italian provinces between 2010 and 2019. Particularly, the waste service efficiency of the 110 provinces was measured by implementing non-parametric Slack Based Measure Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA). A dynamic distributional analysis of efficiencies from 2010 to 2019 was also performed to investigate the behavior of the provinces efficiency in the analysed period specifically considering their size as a discriminant factor influencing it. To this aim a kernel-based method was used. Results show that the efficiency of the MSW collection service in the Italian provinces has increased steadily. The average efficiency grew from 44.7% to 53.0% during the period from 2010 to 2019, following the improvement in the sorted waste collection rate. Furthermore, smaller provinces performed better than larger ones.