MOTIVATING RECYCLING: A MARGINAL COST ANALYSIS

Judge Rebecca and Becker Anthony

Contemporary Economic Policy, 1993, vol. 11, issue 3, 58-68

Abstract: Areas considering alternative house‐to‐house recycling programs as a means of diverting material from landfills can determine the most efficient choice by comparing programs' marginal costs with diversion's marginal benefits. This paper describes a controlled field experiment that observed individual household recycling habits over a six‐month period. The experiment monitored the quantity of material that households recycled under increasingly more convenient (and increasingly more costly) programs. The analysis here uses a Tobit model to determine how the quantity of material diverted varies as a function of convenience factors and demographic characteristics. The analysis compares the value of the expected marginal increase in diversion to the marginal cost of increasing recycling convenience to determine the efficient level of convenience for an area's recycling program.

Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-7287.1993.tb00390.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:coecpo:v:11:y:1993:i:3:p:58-68

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://ordering.onl ... 5-7287&ref=1465-7287

Access Statistics for this article

Contemporary Economic Policy is currently edited by Brad R. Humphreys

More articles in Contemporary Economic Policy from Western Economic Association International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().