Separate waste collection in Italy: the role of socio-cultural factors and targets set by law

Abstract

The aim of this paper was twofold: on the one hand, we analyse the results\ud achieved in terms of percentages of separate collection in Italy by testing the effectiveness\ud of Legislative Decree 152/2006 in improving the separate collection process; on the\ud other hand, we investigate on some of the factors, related to the sociocultural local context,\ud that could explain the different impacts of the law in the three macro-areas considered\ud (North, Central and South Italy). To this purpose, an econometric analysis on the Italian\ud regions for the 1996–2013 period is performed, comparing the period before (1996–2006)\ud and after (2006–2013) the date of entry into force of the new law. The results show the\ud effectiveness of Legislative Decree 152/2006 in promoting separate collection, although a\ud regional difference in terms of separate collection rate is observed. Northern regions\ud proved to be more dynamic and reactive to the above-mentioned legislation, while Central\ud and especially Southern regions achieved poorer results in moving to higher separate waste\ud collection rates. Finally, our work provides evidence on some local factors that may have\ud hampered an effective policy implementation in Southern regions, among them, the\ud presence of criminal activities and the lack of citizen participation in politics

Neighborhood effects and pro-environmental behavior: The case of Italian separate waste collection

“…There is moreover a social demonstration effect. People could be induced to recycle more by a subjective belief that their choice would in turn elicit stronger pro-social orientations in others (Agovino et al, 2016b). All these effects combine into a general perception of self-righteousness related to recycling, which in turn may compound with other pro-environmental psychological factors (Kaida and Kaida, 2016).…”

“…Following Agovino et al (2016a), the choice is to use provincial data because no data at a more fine-grained administrative level (e.g., Municipalities) are as yet available. In addition, Article 23 of Legislative Decree 22/1997 defines the Province as the "optimal area for the management of waste" as far as management of municipal waste is concerned (see Agovino et al, 2016b). In addition, many empirical papers on Italian geographical data show that the Provinces represent the best compromise between excessive heterogeneity (e.g., municipal data) and excessive homogeneity of data (e.g., regional data) [see Arbia et al (2002), and Arbia (2005) for a spatial betaconvergence analysis on Italian provincial data].…”

“…It is a stage of the overall waste management process that takes on a fundamental role in optimizing the next phases (Agovino et al, 2016b). The separate collection rate (SCR) denotes urban waste separately collected as a percentage of total urban waste (see Agovino et al, 2016a).…”

“…One can also consider the I Moran index (MI) as a measure of the degree of spatial autocorrelation, which has the following definition (for details see Agovino et al, 2016b):…”

“…social capital, institutional quality, education, etc.). For this reason, a future goal will be to implement a more robust empirical analysis with the introduction of control variables that allow to capture in a more comprehensive way the socio-economic and cultural differences among Italian Provinces (see Agovino et al, 2016b).…”