Non-constant income elasticities of waste generation

The paper presents an alternative approach to analyzing decoupling between municipal solid waste and economic activity production. The methodology consists of generalizing the functional form of the statistical model of the environmental Kuznets curve. To avoid the limitation of one single alternative hypothesis, we developed a small set of alternatives based on the signs and statistical significance of estimates. We tested the model for all available categories of municipal solid waste in Italian provinces. The necessity of developing an alternative approach resulted from inconsistencies in past studies within the same policy context. Conclusions from similar statistical approaches and models provided contradictory findings for Europe and other regions. The results of our approach suggest that there is no linear correlation between economic activity and municipal solid waste, nor are they (yet) decoupled from economic activity: GDP per capita affects MSW production differently in each province, which is reflected through differences in spatial correlation.