The determinants of waste generation and recycling performance across the Portuguese municipalities - A simultaneous...

Waste management and recycling are fundamental issues for policy makers to protect the environment. Although these topics have been broadly studied at country-level, studies addressing sub-national units are still limited. This research aims to contribute to this field by analyzing the waste generation and recycling processes across the Portuguese municipalities during the period 2009-2018. The paper assesses the decoupling hypothesis consistent with the environmental Kuznets curve, advocating that a threshold of development is reached and, afterwards, environmental degradation declines through less waste production and higher recycling rates. To address this hypothesis the waste generation and recycling equations are estimated using as fundamentals the total production activity and by sector, the population age structure, and population density as proxy for the degree of urbanization. This study also assesses whether the development dichotomy between more and less developed municipalities affects waste and recycling performances, and to what extent the fiscal consolidation period (2011-2014) influenced these processes. Empirical evidence validates the inverted U-shaped relationship between municipal waste generation and overall production per head, the U-shaped relationship between recycling and waste generation, as well as between recycling and the share of the tertiary sector. The municipal production structure is shown to be important for explaining waste generation and recycling behavior, in contrast to population age structure that only differentiates recycling performance. It is also shown that the fiscal consolidation period affected positively the waste and recycling processes, while population density and the development dichotomy are not relevant factors for explaining differences in waste generation and recycling activities across the Portuguese municipalities.