Abstract
Nearly 2000 communities in the US have implemented user fees to finance garbage collection over the last five years. These user fees require households to pay for each bag of garbage presented at the curb for collection (Skumatz 1993). The revenue raised from these user fees has supplanted the use of general tax revenue to finance garbage collection and disposal costs. Benefits to the community include the social value of less garbage and more recycling. The costs include the social cost of additional litter and the value of resources used to administer the program. The magnitudes of both the benefits and costs depend on the waste removal choices of individual households within the community.
We are grateful for helpful suggestions from Lans Bovenberg, Hilary Sigman, and other Congress participants. We are also grateful for financial support from the National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9413334. This paper is part of NBER’s research program in Public Economics. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation or the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Kinnaman, T.C., Fullerton, D. (1995). How a Fee Per-unit Garbage Affects Aggregate Recycling in a Model with Heterogeneous Households. In: Bovenberg, L., Cnossen, S. (eds) Public Economics and the Environment in an Imperfect World. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0661-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0661-0_6
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