A European model for waste and material flows

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Abstract

The use of materials and the generation of waste are linked to economic activities and in many projections these are assumed to be a constant ratio of the economic activities. This may be the case considering detailed economic activities and unchanged technology. However, the assumption of constant coefficients is questionable when linking material use and waste generation to aggregated economic activities. Therefore, in this paper, econometrics is used to test the assumption of constant waste coefficients empirically. The analyses show that an assumption of constant waste coefficients is not supported, generally, and a model allowing for trendwise changing coefficients is developed and used for projections of waste and material flows in 25 European countries.

Introduction

In Europe, waste generation and resource usage are growing and with this concern about related environmental problems. In addition, various means of waste management require different treatment facilities and cause different environmental problems. A prerequisite for sensible waste planning and rational evaluations of future environmental problems is the availability of reasonable projections of material usage and waste generation.

In general, the generation of waste and the use of materials are related to economic activities. However, different economic activities generate different streams of waste and require different quantities of material input. Depending on the data and the economic model/economic forecasts available, links between economic activities and the waste generation/material usage have been established in different ways. Using a detailed computable general equilibrium model (the MSG-EE model, Alfsen et al., 1996), Bruvoll and Ibenholt (1997) link the generation of waste in the Norwegian manufacturing industry to the material input in individual manufacturing branches. In general, they assume that, for each branch, the generation of waste is a constant share of the materials used. By doing this, they account for factor-substitution and technological changes in the production process. Using a more aggregated Danish macro-econometric model ADAM (Dam, 1996), where the material input is a constant share of the production, Andersen et al. (1998) link the generation of waste to the production by branches and to categories of private consumption. Also in this model, the generation of waste per economic activity is assumed constant. By pooling time series for seven years and cross-section data for 49 countries, Berglund and Söderholm (2003) use econometrics to analyse determinants of inter-country differences in waste paper recovery and utilisation rates.

Basically, the assumption of constant waste coefficients1 is argued from considering a single product and the use of an unchanged technology. In this theoretical case, doubling production using the same technology implies a doubling of material usage and waste generation. However, over time, technology may change and looking at aggregated waste streams linked to aggregated economic variables, the composition of products and technologies used may change. Therefore, in this paper, econometrics is used to empirically test the assumption of constant waste coefficients.

A very different approach to forecasting the generation of waste is to use a technical market penetration and stock saturation model, in projections of end-of-life vehicles for example. Using this approach, the stock of a technology, e.g. vehicles, is projected from a technical penetration curve with a saturation level, and the waste is projected using a survival/scrapping curve specific for the technology. Examples of this methodology are found in Kilde and Larsen (2001) and Holtmann (1997).

In the model presented in this paper, the generation of waste and the domestic extraction of materials are linked to a baseline scenario, long-range energy modelling (LREM), that largely builds upon the socio-economic assumptions developed through extensive stakeholder consultation for DG TREN baseline projections ‘European Energy and Transport Trends to 2030’, European Commission (2003).2 To evaluate trends in the waste and material coefficients, econometrics on country specific waste and material extraction data is used.

Section 2 briefly presents the methodology and equations used for analysing trends in waste streams and material extraction. Section 3 summarises data availability and the overall estimation results, and Section 4 presents a baseline projection of European waste generation and material extraction. Finally, Section 5 contains a short summary and the conclusions.

Section snippets

Methodology

The model includes six different streams of waste and three categories of domestic extraction of materials for 27 European countries. To analyse links between waste streams, domestic extraction of material and economic activities in each of the 27 countries a fairly general equation has been formulated and tested on past observations. However, due to theoretical considerations and data limitations some of the equation parameters are restricted in the estimations. Mathematically, omitting

Data and estimation results

A general overview of the data used in the model is given in Table 1, showing the number of observations used in the estimation of equations. For some of the countries, additional waste and material flow data are available, but for these countries lack of data for explanatory variables reduces the number of observations useable for the estimation. The general conclusion from Table 1 is that the data coverage is reasonable for EU-15 Member States, while data for the 10 new EU Member States are

A baseline projection

The estimated equations reported in Sections 2 Methodology, 3 Data and estimation results, form a model for projections that requires input of the economic development and projections of the number of households/inhabitants in individual countries. Taking macro-economic and population projections used in the baseline scenario,4 a baseline projection for the generation of waste and material flows is reported in Skovgaard et al. (2005). The baseline scenario assumes an average

Summary and conclusions

Using past observations in 25 countries for six waste streams and three categories of material extraction, a scenario model for waste generation and material extraction has been developed. Although time series are short and data uncertain, an assumption of constant waste and material extraction coefficients is generally not supported by the estimations. Past trends are caused by changes in economic structure and the use of technology and these may vary significantly in the future. Therefore, a

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