Waste generation and waste disposal are becoming increasingly prominent in the environmental arena, from a policy perspective and in the context of delinking analysis. In general, waste generation is still increasing proportionally with income, and economic and environmental costs associated to landfilling are also increasing.
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of waste generation for municipal and packaging waste, based on panel data for the EU15, to assess the effects of different drivers (economic, structural, policy). The evidence presents valuable policy implications since analyses the extent to which over the last decade delinking occurred for the two waste streams, and how EU waste policy eventually influenced the waste generation-income relationship. We show that for waste generation there is still no absolute delinking trend. Landfill and other waste policy levers do not seem to provide backward incentives for waste prevention, still not an explicit objective of EU environmental policy. As far as packaging waste is concerned, absolute delinking appears for some materials but not in the overall trend, showing the necessity of investigating performances on specific waste streams. Although absolute delinking is far from being generally achieved for waste generation in both cases, there are some first positive signs of an increasing relative delinking for waste generation. Nevertheless, the impact of waste policies, probably due to the strong focus on waste disposal and recovery objectives rather than waste reduction at source, is quite negligible and also endogenous regarding income dynamics. Thus, waste prevention must be the next core objective of waste regulation efforts in the future of the EU.