A New Network DEA Proposal to Assess Efficiency and Effectiveness in Electronic Waste Management

This study estimates the performance of European countries in managing waste electrical and electronic equipment by taking into account their efficiency at different stages of the management process (from collection to recovery, recycling and reuse), and their effectiveness in complying with the targets set by the European Union’s environmental regulation. To this end, in a first step we define a new model for a network frontier efficiency with several stages reflecting the materials flow management process considering the panel structure of the data –namely, a panel data timeinvariant network DEA model–, and an alternative decomposition of the overall efficiency which allows to consider the local efficiencies obtained in each stage of the process. In a second step, we verify the extent to which inefficient countries are able to meet their targets. The study is carried out for a sample of 30 European countries for the period 2014–2017. Results indicate that efforts to reduce inefficiencies should be mainly focused on electronic waste collection. Moreover, findings reveal that the targets set by the European regulation do not take into account each country’s potential and, as a consequence, being inefficient is not an impediment to being effective