Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 324, 15 November 2021, 129190
Journal of Cleaner Production

Identifying opportunities for initiating waste recycling: Experiences of typical developed countries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.129190Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Socioeconomic conditions supporting a country for initiating waste recycling are explored.

  • A socioeconomic foundation framework consisting of five subsystems is constructed.

  • Principal component analysis and panel threshold regression model are combined.

  • Market level and economic level have threshold effect on waste recycling.

  • Waste recycling should be promoted after thoroughly recognizing local socioeconomic conditions.

Abstract

Waste recycling is an effective way for sound waste management, which depends closely on the support of socioeconomic foundation. Which factors restrict waste recycling, and what level of socioeconomic conditions can potentially underpin a country for initiating waste recycling remain to be explored. In this study, a socioeconomic foundation framework consisting of five subsystems (Economy, Society, Technology, Market and Consciousness) is constructed. Principal component analysis and panel threshold regression model are combined to analyze the impacts and proper numerical ranges of the subsystems for waste recycling in 13 developed countries that are recognized as highly efficient upon waste recycling. The results indicate that social level, technological level and consciousness level all positively promote waste recycling, with social level showing the most intensive impact. Market level and economic level have threshold effect on waste recycling, namely, when economic level is within a certain range and market maturity exceeds a certain level an appropriate opportunity appears for initiating waste recycling. When suitable for waste recycling, typically, gross domestic product per capita ranges within 27,654–40,344 USD; use of renewable resources and wastes is larger than 5.07%; proportion of tertiary industry's value added is larger than 67.54%. The findings of this work provide other countries/regions with reference to adequate socioeconomic support and appropriate opportunities for initiating waste recycling.

Introduction

Rapid development of industrialization and urbanization has brought serious environmental pollution and resource shortage all over the world (Ribeiro et al., 2019). Changes in production, life style and consumption pattern lead to the continuous increase in waste production (Wang et al., 2019b). According to the World Bank, cities around the world produced 2.01 billion tons of solid waste in 2018 (Word Bank, 2018). Improper landfilling and incineration can release toxic elements and pollutants that lead to air, water and soil pollution (Wang et al., 2018) and threat to human health (Nordahl et al., 2020). However, “waste is a kind of misplaced resource”. Waste recycling not only contributes to mitigating greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions (Baležentis et al., 2019), but also is considered to be an effective way to fundamentally decouple economic growth from resource use (Corona et al., 2019). The information in Table A-1 in the Appendix shows that some of the high-income countries have initiated waste recycling in a legislative way. For example, Germany established the “Waste Management Law” in 1972; the United Kingdom formulated the “Waste Management Strategy” in 1989; and France enacted the “Waste and Resource Recovery Law” in 1992. The listed countries are all the developed countries. When initiating waste recycling, they all had completed industrialization and shared similarly high level of socioeconomic development (Liu et al., 2018).

Is it plausible to affirm that waste recycling calls for a certain level of socioeconomic foundation to support it? Can it be concluded that only when socioeconomic development reaches a certain level is waste recycling guaranteed? Observed globally, the level of socioeconomic development in most countries, especially the developing countries, cannot adequately support waste recycling at the current stage (Valenzuela-Levi et al., 2021). If these countries blindly implement waste recycling, it will be difficult to achieve the expected institutional effects with labor and material resources wasted. Thereby, this study is aimed to explore the factors restricting waste recycling and the socioeconomic foundation supporting a country or region to undertake waste recycling.

Waste recycling has become the focus of research along with the recognition of its role in resource reutilization and environmental preservation. Existing studies regarding waste recycling mainly involve municipal waste utilities (Fernández-Braña et al., 2019), emerging technologies for waste recycling (Piana et al., 2020), energy and environmental benefits from waste recycling (Liu et al., 2020; Song et al., 2016), waste management measures (Puigvert et al., 2020), waste recycling behaviors of consumers (Zhang et al., 2020), evaluation of waste recycling performance (Mastellone, 2020), new waste recycling industry (King and Boxall, 2019), etc. With more and more countries focusing on waste recycling, the above studies provide governments with reference to formulating sounder waste management policies.

In the developing countries, waste is primarily disposed by landfilling and open dumping (Kumar and Samadder, 2017), while in the developed countries, waste disposition is transferred from landfilling to recycling and energy recovery (Pujara et al., 2019). Another common problem faced by the developing countries is that the municipal solid waste management system is not sound (Esmaeilizadeh et al., 2020) and the efficiency of waste treatment is low (Valizadeh and Hakimian, 2019). Can the developing countries follow the typical developed countries to implement waste recycling? Some scholars have already paid attention to such a problem and conducted related studies. Vujic et al. (2015) analyzed the waste management systems of 27 European Union (EU) member states and found that waste management variables have a strong correlation with gross domestic product (GDP). Socioeconomic development in the developing countries is still unable to underpin the implementation of a policy system like the EU waste management system. Ferronato et al. (2019) compared the EU member Romania with non-EU member Bolivia and argued that the deficiencies in environmental policy, effective investment, and public awareness in the developing countries are obstacles to the realization of effective waste management strategies. Offering economic aids and strengthening regulations could make it easier for Romania to achieve a circular economy. Gunarathne et al. (2019) identified the reasons of recycling industry's deficiency in Sri Lanka from the viewpoint of sustainable waste management, which from a broad perspective recognized the complex and multi-dimensional challenges and solutions in the recycling industries in the developing countries. Bundhoo (2018) assessed the current status of solid waste management in least developed countries from waste generation to disposal and indicated that the challenges faced by the countries included lack of funding, infrastructure, legislations, knowledge, and awareness on solid waste issues. The above studies confirm the large gaps between waste recycling in the developed countries and the developing countries in terms of the supporting socioeconomic aspects.

Some studies have made efforts to identify the main socioeconomic affecting factors of waste recycling to provide a basis for relevant policy formulation. A comparative analysis of waste recycling management policies in India and Tanzania was conducted by Uiterkamp et al. (2011), showing that the level of economic development and industrialization affected the formulation of sustainable recycling plans in the economy. Zaman (2013) analyzed the social factors affecting the improvement of the waste management system in Sweden, finding that the main social factors include residents' environmental behavior and the amount of existing waste. The study of Priti and Mandal (2019) on the Indian waste management policies pointed out that government policies, legal frameworks, financial allocations, and social and cultural backgrounds can influence the development of waste management policies. Valenzuela-Levi (2019) used an econometric model to study the factors related to the recycling effect of solid waste in Chile and concluded that the duration of government recycling services and per capita waste management expenditure are important factors. Some studies were carried out by using questionnaires to investigate the factors affecting waste recycling, which include environmental awareness of residents (Khan et al., 2019), population age structure (Soukiazis and Proenca, 2020), media publicity (Zheng et al., 2020), etc. Some studies further investigated the factors affecting the classification and recycling behaviors of families, including demographic characteristics (such as age (Wang et al., 2020), education level (Knickmeyer, 2020), psychological factors (knowledge literacy, environmental awareness) (Cudjoe et al., 2020), economic factors (family income, incentive policies) (Wang et al., 2019a), social and moral norms (Razali et al., 2020).

A large gap related to socioeconomic context for waste recycling has been confirmed between the developed and developing countries. Some studies provide policy implications to improve the efficiency of waste recycling and how to guide waste recycling behaviors by recognizing the socioeconomic affecting factors of waste recycling. However, how these factors affect waste recycling in different periods of socioeconomic development is not clear. Additionally, a basic socioeconomic level required for initiating waste recycling needs an in-depth exploration. Based on the recognized information on the socioeconomic affecting factors of waste recycling in the existing literature, this study constructs a socioeconomic foundation framework consisting of five subsystems: economic, social, technological, market, and consciousness subsystems. The typical high-income countries recognized with high rate of waste utilization are selected as the empirical targets. Principal component analysis (PCA) and panel threshold regression (PTR) model are combined to prioritize the affecting factors of waste recycling and quantitatively analyze the level of socioeconomic development when reaching which waste recycling can be implemented. The findings are aimed at providing insights into what level of socioeconomic conditions potentially underpins a country for initiating waste recycling based on the experiences of the typical developed countries, which can be references for other countries or regions that have not initiated waste recycling.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the empirical countries, elaborates the construction of the socioeconomic foundation framework, and elucidates the data processing for the PCA and PTR model. Section 3 illustrates the results for the impacts of five subsystems on waste recycling in the empirical countries. Section 4 presents discussion and policy implications excavated. The conclusions are finally drawn in Section 5.

Section snippets

Methods and data

The research procedure is presented in Fig. 1, which consists of four main processes: selection of indicators, construction of the evaluation system, model and methods, and research range. First, 26 indicators are initially selected from reviewed literatures and then the unqualified ones are eliminated. 13 indicators that have most significant impacts on waste recycling are ultimately determined. Second, these indicators are divided into five dimensions, i.e. economic, social, technological,

Impacts of market subsystem on waste recycling

There is a significant correlation between market maturity and waste recycling. It can be noticed from the results in Table 2 that the impacts of market maturity on waste recycling vary upon different economic levels. At low economic level, market maturity does not have a promotive effect on waste recycling (−0.111). At middle economic level, the effect becomes promotive (0.545). At high economic level, the effect turns to be non-promotive (−0.099). At low economic level, less waste is produced

Discussion

Previous studies have demonstrated that socioeconomic indicators are the main factors affecting waste recycling. These factors include income level, degree of industrialization, technological level, industrial activities, residents' environmental awareness, infrastructure construction, etc. Although policy implications to improve the efficiency of waste recycling have been provided, these qualitative conclusions do not fully support the decision on “initiating waste recycling”. So, we follow

Conclusion

A decision on initiating waste recycling entails recognizing the socioeconomic affecting factors and clarifying how the influence is exerted. In this study, 13 developed countries that have initiated waste recycling with high utilization rate of waste resources are selected as the empirical targets. A socioeconomic foundation framework consisting of five subsystems (Economy, Society, Technology, Market and Consciousness) and 13 indicators is constructed. PCA and PTR model are combined to

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Haiyan Duan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Qi Zhao: Data curation, Software, Visualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Junnian Song: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Zhiyuan Duan: Methodology.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 41801199, NO. 71773034).

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