Municipal solid waste management, household and local government participation: a cross country analysis

We envisage the waste management strategy of the local bodies as one of sharing different responsibilities with households along different stages of the process viz., collection, processing and disposal. This difference arises in terms of the variants of Pay-as-You-Throw scheme, recycling arrangements for non-biodegradable waste and treatment options for organic waste. In this article, we account for this policy heterogeneity by locating the waste management practices adopted by different municipal authorities in an integrated strategic framework. We use information on waste management services from country case studies to identify the variations in the sharing arrangements between households and the municipalities in urban areas of low, middle and high-income countries. Our results suggest that an efficient market in waste management might be associated with the degree of apportionment of cost of waste processing by involving households in the primary disposal and private entities in final disposal in the presence of economic instruments.