1.2. Tesis de postgrado
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Item Essays on the economics of waste management and pro environmental behaviorsAutores: Trujillo Barría, Francisca BelénProfesor: Salazar Espinoza, CésarAutor Institucional: Universidad de TalcaProfesor Guía: Chávez Rebolledo, Carlos AlbertoThis dissertation presents three empirical essays related to the study of waste management, recycling, and the impact of policies designed to reduce plastic pollution. The first essay designed and implemented a field experiment to examine the impact of curbside recycling collection service on the recycling and sorting of plastics, with a focus on plastic bottles, in two middle-income neighborhoods in Osorno, a city in southern Chile. Then, special attention is given to the effects of the interactions between both types of recycling services. Furthermore, this work also investigates whether appealing to personal norms reinforces the effect of the curbside recycling collection system. We conducted a nonrandomized experiment with a three-stage intervention. The findings show that a curbside recycling collection service increases plastic recycling, and that both types of recycling options are complementary. The results suggest the absence of reinforcement effect when normative appeals are provided, and that the curbside recycling collection service increases the amount of non-recyclable waste in recycling bins. This is most likely due to the higher chance that people recycling through the curbside recycling collection service can be exposed as recycling improperly. The second essay employs a discrete choice experiment to elicit urban households’ preferences regarding a set of attributes of a door-to-door recycling collection system in a southern city in Chile. The focus is on understanding how these attributes can effectively increase household participation in recycling schemes, particularly in the context of previous exposure to drop-off recycling sites in their neighborhoods. This work considers the estimation of mixed logit and latent-class models to account for heterogeneity in individual preferences. The findings indicate that preferences are heterogeneous and that the open-access street recycling system, which is subject to the inherent problems of street littering, affects household preferences and their potential participation in recycling schemes. The cleanliness of the neighborhood and the types of materials that can be disposed of are among the most important attributes for households. Additionally, socio-economic characteristics and environmental attitudes also affect individuals’ preferences. These results provide valuable and useful insights for developing targeted policies and interventions for waste management in urban areas. The third essay examines the indirect short-term effects of the plastic bag ban on per capita waste generation, recycling volumes, and the composition of recycled materials across Chilean municipalities. To achieve this, panel data models are estimated at the municipal level and an instrumental variable approach is used to address potential endogeneity associated with the municipal-level adoption of the plastic bag prohibition. This study finds that the plastic bag ban increases waste generation, the overall recycling amount and rate, and the recycling amounts of plastic, paper and cardboard, and glass. Additionally, plastic gains relatively more weight in the recycling composition. These results suggest that while the ban effectively promotes recycling across non-plastic materials, this is more likely to be driven by the overall increase observed in waste generation, which may respond to substitution effects. Thus, comprehensive and multi-faceted approaches are needed to effectively transform individual and household consumption and waste generation patterns.
