Assessing the economic and environmental performance of municipal solid waste collection and sorting programmes

The objective of this paper is to assess the economic and envi ronmental performance of municipal multi-material waste collection and sorting programmes, and their contribution to sustainable development. These programmes collect and sort household waste in order to recover materials that are consid ered to be desirable "outputs" of the process. However, recov ery procedures also generate "undesirable outputs" such as pollution, noise and residues. To account for different aspects in a performance measure, the concept of "productive effi ciency" is used. The feasibility of a non-parametric approach to productive efficiency is illustrated and substantiated, including economic and environmental variables in assessing the performances of nine waste collection and sorting pro grammes from European municipalities.