Household response to the loss of publicly provided waste removal: a Saskatchewan case study

Literature has shown that if households bear the cost of waste disposal, th ey buy products with less packaging, recycle more, and reduce their contrib utions to landfills. However, data disclose that there is a great deal of v ariability in these responses. A case study conducted in Saskatchewan revea ls that, when households were forced to bear the costs of disposal during a waste-removal strike, waste to landfills was only slightly reduced. A thre shold price of $2.20 per trip to a landfill was calculated that indicates t hat if costs of waste disposal are higher than this amount, individuals are predicted to transport their waste to the landfills themselves. This low t hreshold price indicates that alternative waste-disposal options for Saskat chewan residents were cheap, thereby causing the increased costs to househo lds to have little influence on the amount of waste discarded. Under these circumstances, economic instruments may have little effect on households' w aste-reduction behavior. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .