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If You Build It, Will They Compost? The Effects of Municipal Composting Services on Household Waste Disposal and Landfill Emissions

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Abstract

Composting food and garden waste generates less methane emissions than landfills, yet most organic waste is landfilled. This paper examines how local government provision of composting services affects the amount of household waste going to landfills. Using quasi-random adoption of curbside organics collection by local councils in Australia, we find that curbside organics collection diverted one-fourth of household waste from landfill to composting. We find no evidence that organics collection altered total household waste and weak evidence of a small negative spillover effect on dry-recycling waste. Our results suggest curbside organics collection could reduce emissions from landfills by 6–26%.

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Notes

  1. Other low-cost options for reducing methane emissions from landfills are gas capture for direct use, gas capture for use in electricity generation, and flaring of landfill gas, whereas waste to energy and mechanical biological treatment are above the low-cost threshold (UNEP and CCAC 2021).

  2. For instance, in the US 46% of food and garden waste is sent to landfills, 10% is incinerated, 18% is sent to other management pathways, and 25% is composted (US EPA 2020). Most of the composted waste is garden waste; 63% of garden waste is composted whereas only 4% of food waste is composted.

  3. We exclude councils that adopt food and garden waste collection prior to our sample period, which are primarily urban councils, as well as councils that do not offer curbside collection of dry-recycling, which are primarily rural councils.

  4. We estimate our event study regression models using both OLS with two-way fixed-effects as well as new event-study estimators that correct for potential biases (de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille 2020; Baker et al. 2021; Borusyak et al. 2021; Callaway and Sant’Anna 2021; Goodman-Bacon 2021; Sun and Abraham 2021). We find little to no difference in our results between the OLS and new estimators.

  5. These facilities use various composting technologies. The most common method in Australian facilities is windrowing, whereby organic matter is placed in rows and turned at regular intervals as it decomposes. The center of the piles are required to reach more than 55 \(^\circ\)C for three consecutive days prior to turning so that the compost is thoroughly pasteurised. Once processed, the nutrient-rich compost is sold on the market (Hyder Consulting 2012).

  6. This range depends on the degree to which composting organic waste leads to avoided landfill emissions. In Australia, estimates span from \(-\)0.25 to \(-\)1.16 tonne carbon dioxide equivalent (CO\(_2\)e) per tonne of food and garden organic waste sent to landfill instead of compost (Encycle Consulting 2013; Biala 2011).

  7. See also Morris and Holthausen (1994), Palmer et al. (1997), Choe and Fraser (1998), Miranda and Aldy (1998), Fullerton and Kinnaman (1996), Nestor and Podolsky (1998), Dijkgraaf and Gradus (2004). Refer to Kinnaman (2017) for a review of this literature.

  8. For example, Fullerton and Kinnaman (1996) find that increasing the per-unit cost of landfill waste reduced the weight of landfill waste by 14% and increased the weight of dry recycling by 16%. Lee (2023) finds that a small food waste tax reduces food waste by 20%.

  9. Ek and Miliute-Plepiene (2018), Alacevich et al. (2021), and our present study contribute to the research surrounding the spillover effects of pro-environment behaviors. Spillovers arise when one pro-environmental behavior affects the propensity a person commits another pro-environmental behavior, such as how sorting food waste affects the propensity to sort dry recycling waste. The literature is mixed as to whether these spillovers are positive or negative (Thøgersen 1999; Thøgersen and Ölander 2003; Whitmarsh and O’Neill 2010; Barr et al. 2010; Weber 1997; Sintov et al. 2019).

  10. Sweden sends less than 1 percent of household waste to landfills, according to Avfall Sverige (2021), the Swedish Waste Management and Recycling association.

  11. According to the World Bank (2023), 69.6% of waste globally is sent to landfills or open dumps while 11.1% is incinerated.

  12. These potential biases from weighting are especially important if treatment effects vary over time.

  13. In Sweden, dry recycling is disposed at dedicated municipal recycling stations.

  14. In comparison, our sample includes 63 municipalities across NSW—24 that adopt curbside organics collection over seven years and 39 that do not adopt.

  15. While not their main analysis, Ek and Miliute-Plepiene (2018) also find evidence of a negative effect of organics collection on residual waste. However, their secondary dataset for residual waste has a high level of missing observations (59–66%).

  16. Alacevich et al. (2021) examine how the temporary reduction in the amount of organic waste disposed of affects GHG emissions (online appendix D). We instead examine how shifting organic waste from landfill to composting affects GHG emissions. We find emissions reductions even without a reduction in the amount of organic waste generated.

  17. With yearly data, we cannot examine the temporary treatment effects at the monthly level found by Alacevich et al. (2021).

  18. Source: NSW FOGO Snapshot, Online, accessed 27 Oct 2023.

  19. This consultancy report combines findings from recent ad hoc bin audits in a sample of NSW councils to estimate average household waste composition by bin type and material. One-time bins audits were conducted in 64 NSW councils between 2011 and 2019. Generally, a bin auditor selects a sample of bins within a council to weigh and manually sort into specific material types (e.g., organics, glass, and plastics). The estimate we cite in the text pertains to 9 bin audits conducted in councils that did not provide an organics collection service at the time of the audit. Bin audits are valuable descriptive exercises for understanding the specific material within each bin. However, since they are expensive to conduct regularly, their cross-sectional nature means they cannot be used to study how waste behaviors change across councils over time.

  20. For example, the proposed FOGO service by Parramatta City Council states that the FOGO service will reduce domestic waste management charges, while the FOGO service rolled out in Bega saw no change to the domestic waste management charge (sources: City of Parramatta, Online; Bega Valley Shire Council, Online, accessed 17 Jun 2022).

  21. Source: NSW EPA, Grants, Online, accessed 27 Oct 2023.

  22. Sources: Wollongong City Council, Online; Randwick City Council, Online, accessed 17 Jun 2022.

  23. The nature of the education campaigns varied across councils. Specific education programs used in NSW include the ‘Less Leftovers in Leichhardt’ program run by the Leichhardt City Council, the Bega Valley Shire Council’s ‘Waste the Facts’ campaign, and the Clarence Valley ‘Mission Compostable’ program.

  24. Source: Randwick City Council, Online; Bega Valley Shire Council, Online, accessed 17 Jun 2022.

  25. Source: Bega Valley Shire Council, Online, accessed 17 Jun 2022.

  26. Roughly 85% of Australians live within 50 km of the coast (source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book Australia, 2014, Online, accessed 27 Oct 2023.

  27. It is worth noting that councils without dry recycling collection produce less total curbside waste. This could reflect that these more rural councils may not need to send their garden waste to landfill due to ample space to let it decompose naturally.

  28. Data on land size and the ratio of multi- to single-unit dwellings were collected from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Census 2011.

  29. Online Appendix Table A1 presents the coefficients from event study Eq. 1 as presented in Fig. 4.

  30. The reason that the pre-policy coefficients in panel (c) are not all precisely zero reflects the fact that staggered DD models estimated with OLS and two-way fixed effects include a weighted average of all 2x2 estimators in the data, including early treated versus later treated. In our robustness section, when we use the alternative event study estimators developed to correct for potential two-way fixed effects biases, these pre-policy coefficients are all precisely zero (see Online Appendix Fig. A1c).

  31. We do not know when in the calendar year councils adopt green bins. Thus our coefficient for the first year of adoption, \({\hat{\beta }}_{0}\), could be underestimated if many councils adopt late in the year.

  32. Online Appendix Fig. A3 presents event study Eq. 1 estimated including control variables for council population and mean income per capita. The inclusion of these controls, which account for changes in population and income over time, do not change the results presented in Fig. 4.

  33. We acknowledge that our aggregate council-year data may hide short-term treatment effect fluctuations at the week and month level and heterogeneous responses across households.

  34. With 24 treated councils, we have power to detect treatment effects for dry recycling as small as \(-0.572\)

  35. Online Appendix Fig. A4 presents the event study results for red bin waste, yellow bin waste, and total curbside waste measured in logs instead of levels. This tells us the (approximate) percent difference in waste by bin type due to green bin adoption. We do not do this for the green bin waste because there cannot be a percent change from zero (i.e., the log of zero is undefined). These figures show our results are robust to using logs instead of levels.

  36. These estimates are country specific. For instance, the net impact on greenhouse gas emission of compost relative to landfill was \(-\)0.86 tonnes CO\(_2\)e per tonne organic waste in Italy (Blengini 2008) and \(-\)2.3 tonnes CO\(_2\)e per tonne organic waste in Brazil (Markgraf and Kaza 2016).

  37. These estimates are for food and garden organic waste together. Garden waste on its own releases more CO\(_2\)e than food and garden waste together (Encycle Consulting 2013).

  38. This calculation uses the statistic that regional NSW makes up 40% of the state’s population (New South Wales Government 2021).

  39. For instance, we can not rule out that organics collection led to a short-term increase in dry-recycling disposal followed by a decrease and return to normal levels.

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  1. Monash Business School, Monash University, Building H, Caulfield East, VIC, 3145, Australia

    Lihini De Silva

  2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Mumford Hall, MC 710, 1301 W Gregory Dr., Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Rebecca L. C. Taylor

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Correspondence to Rebecca L. C. Taylor.

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De Silva, L., Taylor, R.L.C. If You Build It, Will They Compost? The Effects of Municipal Composting Services on Household Waste Disposal and Landfill Emissions. Environ Resource Econ 87, 761–789 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-023-00834-x

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