The Importance Of Waste Management Policy

The production of waste shows an upward trends in recent years because of the development of economy, the increase of single-person households and the change of the waste resource. Eurostat (2015) shows that waste generation by economic activity and households around 28 contries in EU was 2,514,220,000 tonnes. The amount of waste be generated will over the nature assimilative capacity and will have significant negative external cost. Waste management policies is been used to decide how to control, use and disposal waste. In general, waste management policies could be divided into three types: the control of the waste production, discouragement the act of illegal disposal and fixed external cost in the act of authorised disposal.Waste have five different types to be management, from the best to the waste are prefvention, preparing for re-use, recycling, other recovery and disposal. Recycling is a useful strategy to reduce the raw meterial usage, energy usage and pollution. Policy makers want to use waste management policy to

First of all, policy could change the balance of recycling and disposal by rise the cost of using raw materials (‘virgin’ meterials) and the cost of using recycled materials is relatively cheaper. This policy could be explained mathmatically and graphically. Assume the output of a firm is X, recycled materials(R) and virgin materials(V) are two inputs. Based on ecnomy therory, when marginal revenue equals to marginal cost, the optimal profits will be achieved, or it can be illustrated as MR=MC. MCJ here illustrates the combination of MCV and MCR. Government could add subsidies in use of the recycled materials in order to make the MCR more competitive. The increasing amount of the use of recycled materials will lead to decreasing amount of the use of raw materails. Figure 1 shows that process