Relationship between Recycling Rate and Air Pollution: Evidence from Waste Management Municipality Survey in the State of Massachusetts

This study examines the relationship between recycling rate of solid waste and air pollution using data from a waste municipality survey in the state of Massachusetts. Two empirical approaches are followed. The first approach is a fixed effects model, while the second is a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) with fixed effects model. The advantage of the first approach is the ability of controlling for stable time invariant characteristics of the municipalities, thereby eliminating potentially large sources of bias. The second approach is applied in order to estimate the technical efficiency and rank each municipality accordingly. The findings support that a negative relationship between particulate particles in the air of 2.5 micrometres or less in size (PM2.5) and recycling rate is present.

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