Waste Dynamics, Country Heterogeneity and European Environmental Policy Effectiveness

We empirically test the decoupling of waste dynamics with regard to economic growth and the effectiveness of environmental and specific waste-related policies, by exploiting an integrated data set for the EU15 over 1995-2007. We find that absolute delinking for waste generation is far from being achieved in the European Union (EU) despite the fairly stringent and longstanding policy commitment, which was and is still probably too biased towards waste management and waste disposal targets, rather than towards waste prevention per se. On the other hand, policy action as well as country structural factors seems to have an impact on landfill diversion. Country heterogeneity fairly matters: the seemingly unrelated regression analyses that we adopt, including models that tackle policy endogeneity, show that EU average figures often hide high variance in decoupling performances. EU countries can be consistently grouped according to their waste sustainability performances. The results provide food for thought for setting comprehensive EU waste policy strategies jointly aimed at waste reduction and landfill diversion. This is a relevant outcome and food for thought within an EU framework that is strongly oriented towards allowing countries to decide about the implementation of EU Directives.