تجزیه و تحلیل اقتصادی از ملاحظه کردن سیستم بسته بندی ضایعات بازیابی در انگلیس

In order to cope with the increasing scarcity of final dump sites for household wastes, the UK recently introduced an environmental policy targeted at the firms that produce and sell products that generate packaging wastes. This policy requires such businesses to hold predetermined numbers of tradable credits called “Packaging waste Recovery Notes” (PRNs). This article provides insights into the economic implications of such a policy through a simple analytical model of a recyclable product and the PRN markets. Our analysis yields two particularly interesting results. First, an increase in the required recycling rate dampens the output and landfill waste levels, while the effect on the level of recycling activities is ambiguous. Second, an increase in the landfill tax always leads to an increase in the landfill waste. We also discuss how the socially optimal landfill tax in the presence of the PRN market should be chosen.

Among the EU member states, there has been a major push toward diverting wastes away from landfills and promoting recycling as the concern over the shortage of landfill space has been mounting for a while. Since the 1990s, the UK, whose waste management heavily depended on landfills that absorbed over 80 percent of its waste (OECD, 1999), has introduced several policy measures to reduce and recycle wastes. Among them is the approval of tradable credits, called “Packaging waste Recovery Notes” (PRNs), to meet individually specified recycling obligation for firms that produce and sell products that generate packaging wastes. The PRNs are issued by accredited reprocessors according to the amount of waste actually recycled, and traded among regulated firms and recyclers in an open market. Since, through the purchase of the PRNs, the original producers and sellers become somewhat responsible for how the waste originating from their products are treated, the PRN system is often categorized within so-called “Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)” policies. The EPR policies have attracted the attentions of economists mainly for the following two reasons. The first is to provide incentives for producers to “design for environment” (DfE), i.e., to make design changes that reduce waste, such as improving product recyclability and reusability, reducing material usage, and downsizing products (Fullerton and Wu, 1998, Calcott and Walls, 2000 and Calcott and Walls, 2005). The second is to evade the occurrence of illegal dumping by households with significantly high collection fees for their waste. Without charging households for waste collection, the information on the cost of waste treatment will not be transmitted back into the prices in original product markets as in a typical Pigouvian story. Based on such a concern, several studies come up with a set of optimal taxes/subsidies that involve policies that now falls under the EPR umbrella (Fullerton and Kinnaman, 1995, Walls and Palmer, 2001 and Ino, 2011). This paper also supposes that households will not be charged for waste collection service as is currently practiced in the UK, where the service is financed by the general council taxes. Furthermore, we consider that producers or sellers are not directly held financially responsible for the waste disposal, but the implementation of the PRN system aims to force them to take into account the cost of treating the eventual by-products in an indirect way. While existing studies mainly focus on policy mixes to achieve optimal allocations, we presuppose an exogenously given recycling target as this approach is consistent with the existing state of how the policy is implemented in the UK. In this paper, we construct a simple analytical model of a product market and the PRN market so as to gain insights into this new policy instrument. Particularly, we conduct a series of comparative statics analysis to examine, first, how an increase in a target recycling rate affects the equilibrium recycling and landfill waste levels. Another policy effect we explore is that of an increase in the landfill tax, which is simultaneously implemented in the UK. There are two notable results from our comparative statics analysis. First, an increase in the required recycling rate dampens the output and landfill waste levels, while the effect on the recycling activity is ambiguous, partly due to the existence of the PRN market. Second, an increase in the landfill tax (or the price of recycled material) actually raises the amount of landfill waste. In particular, as it becomes increasingly difficult to raise the recycling rate further, a constant rise in the landfill tax can start exacerbating the shortage of landfill sites. This result at least casts some doubt on the effectiveness of implementing the PRN scheme and landfill tax concurrently, as is recently practiced in the UK. After describing the PRN scheme and other relevant policy environment in the UK in the next section, we present the structure of our model in Section 3. In Section 4, we conduct a series of comparative statics analysis in order to examine how the equilibrium outcomes react to marginal changes in respective policy instruments. In Section 5, we briefly discuss how the socially optimal level of the landfill tax needs to be adjusted to a change in the social cost of landfill waste.

In light of the recent policy trend in the UK, our comparative statics analysis focuses on the effects of an increase in the required recycling rate and an increase in the landfill tax on equilibrium outcomes. Our results show that requiring a higher recycling rate reduces landfill waste while this can negatively affect the overall recycling level. Our analytical result also indicates that a higher landfill tax actually increases the amount of landfill waste, which raises a suspicion that the continuous increase in the landfill tax level, as we are witnessing in the UK, may be offsetting the favorable effect of the PRN scheme in terms of reducing the landfill waste. Without the PRN system, the increase in the landfill tax or recycling subsidy should encourage the recycling activities of the recycler and improve the landfill issue. In the presence of the PRN system, however, unless the recycling mandate is raised sufficiently, such a reaction by the recycler necessarily lowers the PRN price and raises the amount of landfill waste in the new equilibrium. The results indicate that the PRN system and the landfill tax are not necessarily complementary for the purpose of alleviating the UK's landfill issue. At least, the results of this paper suggest that the interaction between the PRN system and the landfill tax is more complicated than could be suspected at first glance. Admittedly, there are several interesting features in the packaging waste recycling system in the UK that we must leave out of this paper for simplicity. These include the development of the secondary PRN market and the PERN market, and the possibility of a strong market power possessed by some compliance schemes in the PRN market. Especially the latter consideration would directly affect the results of our analysis. Although the effects of such a market distortion seem rather insignificant so far (Salmons, 2002), this particular concern is often raised against the Producer Responsibility Organization in Germany (Lehmann, 2004 and Fleckinger and Glachant, 2010) and it would be worthwhile to explore the effects of non-competitive market structures in a future study. Also, one may predict that a policy tool that makes producers partly responsible for recycling their packaging waste will stimulate better (i.e., less packaging material) product designs. Incorporating such a consideration into the model adequately would require the setup of a dynamic model that accounts for investment and/or R&D activities. We believe it quite interesting to explore in future studies how different policies affect the incentives for such “green design” in the current policy context in the UK