Assessing the economic and environmental performance of municipal solid waste collection and sorting programmes

The objective of this paper is to assess the economic and environmental performance of municipal multi-material waste collection and sorting programmes, and their contribution to sustainable development. These programmes collect and sort household waste in order to recover materials that are considered to be desirable "outputs" of the process. However, recovery procedures also generate "undesirable outputs" such as pollution, noise and residues. To account for different aspects in a performance measure, the concept of "productive efficiency" is used. The feasibility of a non-parametric approach to productive efficiency is illustrated and substantiated, including economic and environmental variables in assessing the performances of nine waste collection and sorting programmes from European municipalities.