• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.31-50
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• 2022

This paper estimates the price of standard waste bags that satisfies the polluter pays principle. Unlike previous studies, this paper suggests a method that can find new equilibrium prices using a structural relationship between the demand and cost function for the wastes. To do this, we employ the fixed-point iteration. The main findings of this paper are as follows. Assuming that the polluter pays principle is achieved at the average cost for the waste treatment, the price need to be set at a level about 3.12 times higher than the current one. The estimation result using a structural model, however, shows that the price should be set at a level four times higher than the present. This results are because the quantities reduced of the wastes make the cost per quantity of wastes due to the fixed costs increase. If applying the estimated price to the demand function, the amount of discharge of waste generated nationwide can be reduced by 10%.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.747-761
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• 2015

This paper investigates the impact of an increase in unit price of solid waste collection on demand for alternative solid waste disposal types. I control for other variables affecting the demand and employ both community and time fixed effects models in the estimation of each reduced-form demand functions. Estimation results show that an increase in unit price reduces the demand for garbage bag collection services of non-food solid wastes while it increases the demand for food wastes and source-separated recyclables. These results imply that reduction in the demand for non-food solid wastes collection is mainly achieved by increasing the amount of recyclables and food wastes collected. However, it appears that an increase in unit price increases the total amount of solid wastes generated. This suggests that price incentive effects are offset by the decrease in source-reduction efforts because of feedback effects resulting from the increase in recycling, food waste separation, and illegal disposal of wastes.