Waste and Environmental Policy

This book originated from various institutional research projects and other individual pieces of research, conducted since 2003 on the topic of waste economics and policy, including waste management, effectiveness of waste policy at EU and national levels, evaluation of market and non-market effects of landfill sitings. The analysis of waste has found some collocation within a research area that deals with the de-coupling of major environmental pressures from economic growth, in which waste-related issues are as relevant as, for example, climate change and water supply. The sustainability of waste generation, management and disposal is key to the wider issue of the sustainability of economic development. We would underline that the chapters in this volume are not a collection of papers associated with a single project, but represent are the product of different analyses, at the European and Italian levels, with diverse starting points, which find some convergence and complementarity in terms of their methodology and results. Much of the collaboration and complementarity among the researchers involved in this volume are ongoing and further analyses on waste management, the economics of waste and assessments of waste and environmental policy effectiveness can be expected. Most of the research in this book has been developed cooperatively with partners from the National Research Council in Milan (specifically the Institute for the Study of firms and development, and Economic Systems Dynamics, now CERIS DSE), the University of Bologna (Department of Economics and Faculty of Law), and the University of Ferrara (Department of Economics, Institutions and Territory). A major stimulus for the analytical work described in this book is the collaboration between CERIS-DSE, APAT (the Italian Environmental Protection Agency, which is the data source for most of these analyses, and the European Topic Centre on Waste and Material Flows in Copenhagen. This collaboration started in 2002-2003, in the form of a series of projects under the umbrella of the European Environmental Agency (EEA) focusing on issues such as resource extraction and management, waste packaging policies, EU policies for landfill diversion, methodology for evaluation of policy effectiveness, among others. The results of these analyses are referenced and acknowledged as the inspiration for the current work. In the course of this research, several doctoral students joined the research network and the work on waste issues. They have contributed greatly to several of the papers that form the chapters of this book. Formal and informal research networks are defining and creating a set of expertise and accumulated knowledge on waste policy effectiveness, the driving forces for reductions in waste generation and landfill diversion. This book, rather than being a conclusion, represents a departure in the direction of new investigations and better evidence in relation to the complex web of direct and indirect factors contributing to the target of reducing the economic and environmental pressures/costs associated with waste generation, collection and disposal. This task is posing increasing challenges to institutions devoted to data collection and monitoring, which are required to provide detailed and reliable data in a difficult environment in terms of data assessments, to researchers who need to define and refine economic and policy oriented empirical models, in which the interaction and endogeneity that characterizes certain key factors, the dynamic framework and the spatial/regional features of waste systems are extremely challenging issues. It should be noted that this book by chance was being compiled at a time when the topic of waste has become critical in parts of Southern Italy. When the delicate balance between waste generation and disposal breaks down, due to policy failures or inadequacies related to both waste collection and management, local environmental pressu...