Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

By 2027, all Swedish municipalities must implement curbside collection of packaging recycling. This was decided with hopes to increase collected packaging material, while also decreasing the dilution of the sorted waste. Projections made up until this point show that recycling rate targets of 70% for 2030 in Sweden will not be met. This study investigates the effects from curbside collection on collected packaging and residual waste, and discuss these effects applied to the 2030 target. The research design is a staggered Difference-in-Differences method applied over the years 2011-2023. The Two-Way Fixed Effects model is used as a baseline, while the estimator from Abraham & Sun (2021), which corrects for heterogeneity across time and units is the headline model. Furthermore, the Callaway & Sant’Anna (2021) estimator is used as robustness check, alongside with a pseudo-timing test to control for parallel trends. Data has been collected from AvfallWeb, a website that gathers waste statistics from Swedish municipalities.

The estimation from Abraham & Sun (2021) showed increasing, yet fading effects in packaging waste of 10,06kg/capita/year as a result of curbside collection. Meanwhile, residual waste showed decreasing and persistent effects of 29,2kg/capita/year. Put in regard to the 2030 target, these results are projected to carry Swedish recycling across the 70% mark.