Conference Agenda

Landfilling notoriously has environmental impacts, adversely affecting air, soil and water. It therefore represents a waste management strategy of last resort, and reducing the landfilling rate is essential to mitigating these externalities. Nevertheless, deploying this potential is difficult in the absence of citizen participation in sorting. To correct for these negative externalities and market failure, contemporary policy discussions so far mainly focus on taxation and thus largely overlook market-based solutions. In this study, we first discuss the conditions favouring the effectiveness of a cap & trade (C&T) approach for municipal solid waste management. We identify five elements characterizing a C&T system for waste: cap definition, allocation of pollution permits, liquidity and market power, price volatility, and participant compliance; that we further investigate for the implementation of a Waste Trading System in large and populated urban areas. We subsequently applied our analysis to the specific case of Hong Kong. We determine the agents concerned, the optimal social cost of waste, the number of permits for the total period as well as its allocation method, together with the potential market design scenario with regard to the particularities of Hong Kong and its climate regulation in the broad sense.

We study the implications of the Chinese waste import ban of 2018 on intra-European waste trade. Specifically, we ask if it led to a ``waste haven'' effect, which would imply that countries with high disposal and recycling costs started to export more waste to countries with lower costs. We estimate a theoretically motivated gravity regression to study how waste was distributed within Europe before and after the ban. We find strong evidence that countries with higher costs of disposal indeed started to export plastic waste towards lower cost countries as a result of this ban, but we can not find the same effect for recycling costs. We furthermore find evidence that countries started to export more waste to countries with higher disposal capacities, indicating an increase in overall disposal. Our results raise distributional questions about the allocation of waste externalities and have implications for current debates on the legislation of waste shipments.

Effective waste segregation remains a challenge, particularly in urban areas with high population density. In earlier studies, it was found that people in Poland want to sort, but only 52% of them can segregate waste without errors in home sorting. Therefore, we investigate the acceptance of possible control systems, designed to correct such violations. This paper investigates the preferences of citizens of the Tricity region in Poland (Gdansk, Gdynia, Sopot) for potential regulations aiming at reducing contamination of waste sorted at the household level. We conducted a Discrete Choice Experiment on a representative sample of 1019 respondents. We asked them to choose between four methods of verification if the waste was sorted correctly. We included a penalty payment dependent on the result of such an inspection. Our study confirmed that financial aspects are the most significant factors shaping waste management behaviour, as indicated by 67% of respondents. On average, Tricity residents were against introduction of new control system, but the variation of preferences was substantial. They were more likely support inspections of containers and the provision of additional information, but they disapprove of the individual apps to control waste contamination. We explore the role of social norms, knowledge of waste sorting rules, and experience of waste sorting violations on the preferences.