Garbage In and Garbage Out? On Waste Havens in Switzerland

This study investigates whether the introduction of a unit-based garbage fee induces waste dumping in nearby communities which do not implement such a policy. To identify the existence of a waste haven effect, I hypothesize that the likelihood of importing or exporting waste depends on the distance to municipalities which have chosen the alternative policy option. Distances between municipalities are captured by routing data. I find some evidence for waste havens in a cross-section of Swiss municipalities. Exploiting variation in waste policy over time in a panel dataset for the canton of Ticino, I find that a decrease in distance is associated with an increase in the amount of waste collected by non-unit-pricing municipalities. The effect size is relatively small: An increase by one standard deviation in the impact factor applied to identify the waste haven effect increases the amount of collected waste per capita in non-unit-pricing municipalities by less than 3%.