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Microchipped bags and waste sorting

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Abstract

We evaluate the effectiveness of attaching microchips to bags for curbside collection in reducing unsorted urban solid waste and increasing the fraction of recycled waste. The microchip enables the local police to identify the users that have left the bags on the curb and check whether they have sorted the waste properly. Our study is carried out in the Italian province of Macerata (Marche, Italy), where the microchipped bags were introduced only in some municipalities in 2013. Exploiting monthly information on waste collection and natural experiment methods, we find that, 2 years after the program started, the microchipped bag system had increased the fraction of recycled waste by 3–4.5 percentage points and decreased the monthly unsorted waste by 1–2 kilograms per capita.

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Notes

  1. The European Waste Framework Directive (EU 2008) and the Circular Economy Package, which includes the revision of legislative proposals on waste with Directive (EU) 2018/851 (EU 2018), set clear and long-term targets for municipal waste management and recycling.

  2. See Knickmeyer (2020) and Varotto and Spagnolli (2017) for recent literature reviews on the main social factors and psychological intervention strategies influencing household recycling behavior.

  3. The meta-analysis in Bel and Gradus (2016) clarifies that the effectiveness of the unit pricing system depends crucially on the unit chosen for computation of the fee: weight-based systems generate the largest effect on waste quantities, whereas volume-based systems (i.e., the bin- and bag-based systems) are not effective.

  4. These figures were gathered from the national waste register of Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA) and retrieved on 05/11/2020 from https://www.catasto-rifiuti.isprambiente.it.

  5. The capital of the province, Macerata, joined COSMARI in January 2014 and in March 2014 was the 10th municipality to adopt the microchipped bag program, although only in the city center.

  6. We retrieved the monthly data on waste collection and disposal from https://www.cosmarimc.it/raccolta-differenziata/?m=raccolta-differenziata in September 2019.

  7. The municipalities removed for this reason were Acquacanina, Bolognola, Castel Sant’Angelo, Fiastra, Poggio San Vicino, Sefro, Serravalle, and Ussita.

  8. We contacted the senior management of COSMARI by phone on 20/09/2019 and by e-mail on 20/09/2019 and 14/10/2019 to obtain clarifications about the data anomaly, but we received no reply.

  9. With ‘sorted waste’ we refer to the urban waste which is separated by users for recycling. With ‘unsorted waste’ we refer to the residual, mixed urban waste that the waste management company can eventually process to extract materials which are technically and economically recyclable. The ‘fraction recycled’ is the ratio between the sorted waste (sorted by users) and the total urban waste (sorted plus unsorted waste).

  10. See https://www.cosmarimc.it/progetti-speciali/?m=progetti-speciali (last accessed on 5 November 2021) for a list of the special projects of COSMARI.

  11. We do not use the SCM in this robustness test as the SCM is well suited to comparative case studies where one unit or a small number of units are treated. Here, we have 21 treated municipalities and 16 controls.

  12. These figures come from Eurostat and are available at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rt120/ (last accessed on 15 November 2021).

  13. We in fact estimated an average insignificant increase in the monthly organic waste of about 0.1 kg per person from the classic DiD (both with and without municipal linear trends), 0.2 kg per person from SCM, and \(-0.03\) kg per person from IFE-DiD. These estimation results are available from the author upon request.

  14. These costs are from the point of view of the municipalities. The costs for waste collection, disposal and recycling sustained by the waste management company are not considered but assumed to coincide with what was charged to the municipalities of the consortium.

  15. Since the number of domestic and non-domestic users was around 27,000, the net yearly cost for each user was about €2.26–4.93.

  16. See Huber et al. (2013) for a Monte Carlo analysis of the reliability of IPW and a comparison with alternative matching estimators using a simulation design based on real data.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Roberto Esposti and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Marche Polytechnic University, Piazzale Martelli 8, 60121, Ancona, Italy

    Matteo Picchio

  2. Department of Economics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Matteo Picchio

  3. IZA—Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany

    Matteo Picchio

  4. GLO—Global Labor Organization, Essen, Germany

    Matteo Picchio

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Results for the fraction of waste recycled and monthly unsorted waste per capita (kg/pop) including Civitanova Marche in the sample
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Table 6 Results for the fraction of waste recycled and monthly unsorted waste per capita (kg/pop) with inverse probability weighting
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Picchio, M. Microchipped bags and waste sorting. Environ Econ Policy Stud 25, 1–30 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-021-00338-2

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