The regional heterogeneity of household recycling: a spatial-econometric analysis of Swedish plastic packing waste

Olle Hage,Christer Berglund,Krister Sandberg,Patrik Söderholm

doi:10.1007/s12076-017-0200-3

Abstract

Environmental policy is often formulated at the national level, but the primary responsibilities for policy implementation, monitoring and compliance are often assigned to local actors (e.g., municipalities). This paper investigates the regional heterogeneity of household plastic waste collection among Swedish municipalities, and how collection rates have been influenced by local waste management policies, geographical conditions and socio-economic characteristics. This is achieved by employing spatial econometric methods and cross-sectional data for 282 Swedish municipalities. The results confirm the presence of spatial correlation. Furthermore, municipalities that employ weight-based waste management fees generally experience higher collection rates. The presence of curbside recycling and a high intensity of recycling drop-off stations, i.e., policy measures that help improve the infrastructural conditions for household recycling, also help explain why some municipalities perform better than others. However, the correlations between packaging waste collection and a number of important regional cost variables, such as the distance to the recycling industry, urbanization rate and population density, turn out both statistically and economically insignificant. An important explanation for this could be that the Swedish producer responsibility scheme has offered regionally differentiated (and fixed) monetary compensations to local collection entrepreneurs, and these have typically been higher in high-cost regions. This implies that plastic packaging waste collection in Sweden has been performed in a spatially cost-ineffective manner.

Highlights

The European Union (EU) promotes a transition to a circular economy in which the value of products, materials and resources are maintained as long as possible (European Commission 2015)
The purpose of this paper was to analyze the determinants of inter-municipality differences in the collection of household plastic packaging waste in Sweden
We used spatial econometric methods and the results revealed that spatial interaction is present in the data used, and when we controlled for this, and attempt to address the presence of heteroscedasticity, we obtain results that are fairly robust across different model specifications

Summary

Introduction

The European Union (EU) promotes a transition to a circular economy in which the value of products, materials and resources are maintained as long as possible (European Commission 2015). The purpose of the paper is to analyze the determinants of household plastic waste collection in Swedish municipalities, including the role of local waste management policy, geographical and socio-economic conditions and environmental preferences. The material companies have engaged different collection entrepreneurs that operate in municipalities; these put out and empty the containers at the stations, and transport the plastic waste to recyclers These operations have to 90 percent been funded through fees paid by the packaging producers (Hage 2007). If our empirical analysis indicates that important regionspecific collection cost elements tend to have negligible impacts on plastic packaging collection rates, this could be interpreted as support for the hypothesis that the spatial cost-effectiveness of the Swedish policy scheme is low Another key contribution is that we test and control for spatial dependency in waste collection rates.

Data sources and definitions

Model specification and econometric issues

Empirical results and discussion

Findings

Concluding remarks and implications