Undergraduate Research: An Archive - 2022 Program

Pooja Parmar ’22
ECONOMICS
Certificate in Environmental Studies
THESIS TITLE
Is Recycling the Best
Method for Waste
Management: An
Analysis of the
Environmental and
Economic Impacts of
Recycling (2009-2018)
ADVISER
Andrea Wilson, Lecturer
in Economics
Waste management has become a priority issue
as a result of China’s 2017 ban on contaminated
plastics. As landfills have reached capacity,
recycling has been the default method for
waste management for decades. Despite the
continued investment of local governments into
developing recycling programs, limited research
has been conducted into the environmental
and economic benefits of recycling. My thesis
attempted to evaluate the impact of municipal
solid waste (MSW) on environmental factors (air
quality, fuel consumption and net generation)
and economic factors (real GDP) in seven states:
Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
New Jersey, Oregon and South Carolina. At a
state level, recycling led to better air quality
and had a positive effect on real GDP, but it also
increased fuel consumption and net generation.
However, when using a fixed-effects ordinary
least squares (OLS) model using county-level
data, I found that recycling has no effect — or
only a small positive impact —on environmental
and economic factors, while increased access to
recycling has a negative impact on GDP. These
results are important for informing future wastemanagement
policies that attempt to transition
away from recycling toward reduce-and-reuse
processes.
ENVIRONMENTAL
POLICY AND SOCIETY
20