The Economic and Environmental Impact of Wastepaper Trade and Recycling in India

Pieter van Beukering and Anantha Duraiappah

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 1998, vol. 2, issue 2, 23-42

Abstract: There have been increasing pressures by governments and nongovernmental organizations to restrict international trade in waste in the conviction that each nation has to take care of its own waste. We develop a sectoral flow model to investigate if free trade in nontoxic waste can support economic development and simultaneously reduce environmental degradation. The model is formulated as a nonlinear programming model with an objective function that minimizes environmental and economic costs. The model in principle describes the life cycle of Indian paper: Preliminary results suggest that trade in wastepaper is both economically and environmentally advantageous. The results also show that domestic and imported waste‐paper are complementary and that import of wastepaper does not “crowd out” the domestic waste paper sector. This implies that the current trend of increasing trade of wastepaper does contribute to a more sustainable paper cycle in India.

Date: 1998
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