Sustainability gaps in municipal solid waste management: The case of landfills

Stefan Bayer and Jacques Mery
Additional contact information
Stefan Bayer: Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg
Jacques Mery: French institute of agricultural and environmental engineering research (Cemagref)

No 47/2006, Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg

Abstract: Our paper compares external effects of two municipal solid waste disposal technologies, bioreactor and dry tomb landfills, in a 600-year time-horizon using two different discounting techniques: Constant conventional discounting and Generation Adjusted Discounting (GAD). The paper starts with a short description of the basic characteristics of the two landfill-types. To demonstrate the sustainability deficiencies of constant discounting sustainability gaps are defined and calculated. Reference case for these calculations is the GAD which takes into account the basic requirements of sustainable development, namely intergenerational equity. Our calculations show that constant discounting usually uses too high discount rates to be in accordance with fundamental sustainability criteria leading to biased political suggestions. However, our approach is not solely restricted to landfills. It could be used as a guide to quickly check whether the results of social cost-benefit analyses of long-term public projects are in accordance with fundamental sustainability criteria.

Keywords: Generation Adjusted Discounting (GAD); constant discounting; sustainability gap; external costs; bio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2006-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/index_wab7kgX95kJrB4ft.html Full text
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/index_wab7kgX95kJrB4ft.html [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/index_wab7kgX95kJrB4ft.html)

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:ris:vhsuwp:2006_047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Bekcmann ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).