Investigating the Economic Efficiency of Waste Collection and Transportation - Case Study for Urban and Rural Municipalities in Poland

Abstract

This article presents the results of the analysis of waste collection in selected rural and urban municipalities in the Silesian Voivodship in Poland in the years 2014-2018. A new approach has been presented for the evaluation of the economic efficiency of the waste management system including all costs and revenues both for the local administration and the waste collection company in a circular economy context.The results include the impact of significant factors affecting the total cost of collection, which include transportation costs, personal costs, as well as administrative costs, including fees for using the environment and the fee for waste management at the landfill. The mass from the separate collection increased for three municipalities from 2014, showing a positive impact of the new regulations considering secondary raw materials for recycling. In the five years of the study, the variable purchase prices of recyclable materials adversely affected the economic efficiency of the collection, which increased fees charged by municipalities to residents. The increase in costs was significant for the five years included in the study for a landfill fee increase of 40%, for an environmental fee increase of 15% and an increase of waste collection costs above 20%. The main contribution of revenues is the waste collection fee from residents. As a consequence, the municipalities must increase waste collection fees. Due to a much larger number of waste categories and unstable purchase prices of secondary raw materials, waste-collecting companies should pay attention towards reducing transport costs and using human resources more efficiently.

The Circular Economy as an Axis of Agricultural and Rural Development: The Case of the Municipality of Almócita (Almería, Spain)

“…Therefore, the current framework such as the one suffered by the municipality with the lack of diversified projects seems to further aggravate the competitive disadvantages of these rural mountain municipalities, despite having other great advantages. It is, therefore, necessary to establish a geographical differentiation and to elaborate an exhaustive analysis when presenting circular economy proposals in order to clearly identify the starting point, as has been performed in the research on the renewal of Italian municipal waste systems [88] or the collection system of Polish rural and urban municipalities [89], which show how localization is a factor to be taken into account in the elaboration of these projects if we are looking for efficiency.…”

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“…However, most of the existing researches have ignored the different forms of urban growth reflected by the relative differences in population and economic growth of cities at different stages of development. In the early stage of urban development, the improvement of urban economic efficiency mainly comes from the local specialization of production, and the localized external economy brought about by the agglomeration of industrial specialization is the key to urban economic growth [3]. The improvement of production efficiency at this stage is the driving force for urban growth, and it is also the main reason for driving population immigration, which makes urban economic growth relatively faster than population growth.…”