Measuring technical, environmental and eco-efficiency in municipal solid waste management in Chile

ABSTRACT

Moving towards a circular and sustainable economy requires improving the management of municipal solid waste (MSW) increasing recycling rates while minimising unsorted waste and operational costs. It is essential to evaluate the economic and environmental efficiency of MSW services. Previous studies focused on developed countries and employed radial parametric and non-parametric methods. By contrast, this study assessed the technical efficiency, environmental efficiency and eco-efficiency of several Chilean municipalities employing the non-radial range adjusted measure approach. A second stage of assessment was conducted to explore the influence of a set of environmental variables on efficiency scores. Results revealed that the evaluated Chilean municipalities performed poorly from a technical perspective since the average technical efficiency score was 0.484. By contrast, average environmental efficiency and eco-efficiency scores were 0.899 and 0.922, respectively. Nevertheless, the percentage of eco-efficient municipalities was lower than 1%. It was also found that tourism had a major and negative impact on all types of efficiency. By contrast, population density had a significant and positive impact on environmental efficiency. The assessment of three types of efficiency provides relevant information to policymakers to define specific strategies to improve MSW management according to sustainability and circular economic objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Eco-efficiency
• undesirable outputs
• non-radial data envelopment analysis
• regression tree
• circular economy
• municipal solid waste

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Eco-efficiency is defined as the production of more goods (outputs) and services with fewer resources (inputs) and less of an environmental impact (Beltrán-Esteve, Reig-Martínez, and Estruch-Guitart 2017). The prefix ‘eco’ represents the environmental and economic performance; therefore, the assessment of eco-efficiency involves considering both environmental and economic variables (Gomez et al. 2018).

2. Two alternative non-parametric methods are free disposal hull (FDH) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). On the one hand, FDH method relies exclusively on monotonicity and minimal extrapolation. On the other hand, DEA additionally assumes convexity (Deprins and Simar 1984). Moreover, in the case of DEA, the estimator is a piece-wise linear function, while in the case of FDH, the estimator is a step function.

3. On 6 October 2021, the conversion rate was: 810 CLP $\cong$ 1US$ and 940 CLP $\cong$ 1€

4. The intercept is the expected mean value of Y when all X = 0. If X sometimes equals 0, the intercept is simply the expected mean value of Y at that value.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo [Fondecyt 1210077].

Notes on contributors

Ramon Sala-Garrido

Ramon Sala-Garrido is PhD in Economics and full professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Valencia.

Manuel Mocholi-Arce

Manuel Mocholi-Arce is PhD in Economics and professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Valencia.

Maria Molinos-Senante

Maria Molinos-Senante is PhD in Local Development and Territory. She is professor at Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.

Alexandros Maziotis

Alexandros Maziotis is PhD in Economics and postdoc researcher at Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.