Eco-Efficiency in the Italian Waste Management sector

In the light of the recent European environmental regulation, in Italy, waste collection management has been involved in some important changes both from environmental and management point of view. From the one hand, firms want to maximize the quantity of collected Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) showing an increasing capacity of waste collection per unit of labor and capital, from the other hand they want to minimize the level of Undifferentiated Solid Wastes (USW) in order to meet environmental goals. This paper extends the concept of Directional Distance Function (DDF) to the waste sector, in which previous applications of efficiency models have been mainly focused on the cost-function side. The idea of DDF (by Chambers et al.,1996; 1998) is here applied to treat asymmetrically two categories of outputs: one desirable (amount of MSW) and one undesirable (level of undifferentiated wastes) both observed (with inputs) from a sample of around 450 Italian municipalities during 2006. Computed efficiency scores are analyzed in light of different tariff systems (e.g. flat fee and pay as you through), different socio-economic contexts (e.g. Northern vs Southern Italy) and prevalent political side in local government (Left wings vs Right-wing parties). Keywords: 4-6 nanocompounds, atmospheric pollutants, social costs evaluation, social saving, titanium dioxide.