Examining the Justification for Residential Recycling

Municipalities in the United States have for the past two decades initiated two policies to reduce residential solid waste generation by increasing recycling. The first policy, implemented in over 4,000 municipalities in the United States, requires households to pay a fee for each unit of garbage presented at the curb for collection. The second policy, initiated in 8,875 municipalities, subsidizes household recycling efforts by providing free curbside collection of certain recyclable materials. Both initiatives serve as examples of incentive-based environmental policies favored by many economists. But before economists can celebrate this wide-spread adoption of incentive-based environmental policies, further examination reveals that potentially inefficient command and control policies have been more instrumental in promoting recycling than might be commonly known. This article examines the empirical lessons gained from studying twenty years of solid waste policy in the United States and argues for the replacement of several state recycling mandates with a system of state and/or national landfill taxes.

Explaining the Growth in Municipal Recycling Programs: The Role of Market and Non-Market Factors

The implementation of thousands of municipal recycling programs in the United States has increased recycling’s portion of solid waste from 10% to 30% over the past decade. But the lack of accurate data has spurred a debate over whether the growth in recycling can be attributed to market or nonmarket factors. To address this issue, this article conducts a benefit-cost analysis of a municipal recycling program. Results suggest recycling is costly. So why, then, does it remain popular? This article suggests that local governments could be responding to households that perceive a benefit from recycling services. These benefits are estimated with a contingent valuation survey.

Optimal Solid Waste Policy with Centralized Recycling Opportunities

Economic models have demonstrated the efficiency of curbside collection taxes. This paper demonstrates that such efficiencies disappear in economies with centralized recycling options - where recyclable materials can be removed from the waste stream either by households or at a centralized recycling facility. In such economies a curbside garbage tax not only fails to encourage the centralized recycler to internalize the external costs of waste disposal, but introduces inefficiencies to the cost-minimizing mix of household and centralized recycling efforts. The optimal waste policy is a tax assessed further downstream at the landfill rather than at the curb.

The Costs of Municipal Curbside Recycling and Waste Collection

This paper estimates cost functions for both municipal solid waste collection and disposal services and curbside recycling programs. Cost data are obtained from a national survey of randomly selected municipalities. Results suggest, perhaps unsurprisingly, that both marginal and average costs of recycling systems exceed those of waste collection and disposal systems. Economies of scale are estimated for all observed quantities of waste collection and disposal. Economies of scale for recycling disappear at high levels of recycling - marginal and average cost curves for recycling take on the usual U-shape. Waste and recycling costs are also estimated as functions of factor costs and program attributes.

A Metric to Evaluate and Synthesize Distributed Compliant Mechanisms

Compliant mechanisms with evenly distributed stresses have better load-bearing ability and larger range of motion than mechanisms with compliance and stresses lumped at flexural hinges. In this paper, we present a metric to quantify how uniformly the strain energy of deformation and thus the stresses are distributed throughout the mechanism topology. The resulting metric is used to optimize cross-sections of conceptual compliant topologies leading to designs with maximal stress distribution. This optimization framework is demonstrated for both single-port mechanisms and single-input single-output mechanisms. It is observed that the optimized designs have lower stresses than their nonoptimized counterparts, which implies an ability for single-port mechanisms to store larger strain energy, and single-input single-output mechanisms to perform larger output work before failure.

Performance Modeling Of Reconfigurable Distributed Systems Based On The Opensparc Fpga Board And The Sirc Communication Framewor

This thesis explores system performance for reconfigurable distributed systems and provides an analytical model for determining throughput of theoretical systems based on the OpenSPARC FPGA Board and the SIRC Communication Framework. This model was developed by studying a small set of variables that together determine a system¿s throughput. The importance of this model is in assisting system designers to make decisions as to whether or not to commit to designing a reconfigurable distributed system based on the estimated performance and hardware costs. Because custom hardware design and distributed system design are both time consuming and costly, it is important for designers to make decisions regarding system feasibility early in the development cycle. Based on experimental data the model presented in this paper shows a close fit with less than 10% experimental error on average. The model is limited to a certain range of problems, but it can still be used given those limitations and also provides a foundation for further development of modeling reconfigurable distributed systems.

Design and Development of an FPGA-based Distributed Computing Processing Platform

This thesis presents two frameworks- a software framework and a hardware core manager framework- which, together, can be used to develop a processing platform using a distributed system of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) boards. The software framework providesusers with the ability to easily develop applications that exploit the processing power of FPGAs while the hardware core manager framework gives users the ability to configure and interact with multiple FPGA boards and/or hardware cores. This thesis describes the design and development of these frameworks and analyzes the performance of a system that was constructed using the frameworks. The performance analysis included measuring the effect of incorporating additional hardware components into the system and comparing the system to a software-only implementation. This work draws conclusions based on the provided results of the performance analysis and offers suggestions for future work.

Determining the Socially Optimal Recycling Rate

What municipal recycling rate is socially optimal? One credible answer would consider the recycling rate that minimizes the overall social costs of managing municipal waste. Such social costs are comprised of all budgetary costs and revenues associated with operating municipal waste and recycling programs, all costs to recycling households associated with preparing and storing recyclable materials for collection, all external disposal costs associated with waste disposed at landfills or incinerators, and all external benefits associated with the provision of recycled materials that foster environmentally efficient production processes. This paper discusses how to estimate these four components of social cost to then estimate the optimal recycling rate. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Socially Optimal Recycling Rate: Evidence from Japan

This paper estimates the average social cost of municipal waste management as a function of the recycling rate. Social costs include all municipal costs and revenues, costs to recycling households to prepare materials estimated with an original method, external disposal costs, and external recycling benefits. Results suggest average social costs are minimized with recycling rates well below observed and mandated levels in Japan. Cost-minimizing municipalities are estimated to recycle less than the optimal rate. These results are robust to changes in the components of social costs, indicating that Japan and perhaps other developed countries may be setting inefficiently high recycling goals. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.