Efficiency of Italian Municipalities and Waste Regulatory Target

Due to increasing consumption and urbanization, urban waste collection has gained a lot of attention in recent years. One of the main problems in this field is the balance between management costs, proper waste collection, and regulatory target. Waste collection is critical to pursue a high recycling capacity. There are two main types of collection: sorted waste, which separates collection after recycling or composting, and unsorted waste, which does not. As a result, Italy's main concerns in recent years have been urban waste management and recycling. One of the main reform in the Italian waste collection was introducing the sorted collection target of 65% with the legislative decree no. 252/2006. We analyze the efficiency and the effect of population, density, income and size on the sorted waste collection of 275 Italian municipalities from 2016 to 2019. We apply recently introduced smoothed approximations of nonparametric frontier models (Daraio and Simar, 2022) to estimate the coefficients of the cost efficiencies of sorted and unsorted waste. This approach does not assume any hypothesis on the efficient frontier's functional form and on the inefficiency's distribution. We analyze the effect of external and environmental factors, related to economies of scale (population served), territorial size, economies of density (population density) and economic development considering the municipalities that reached the regulatory target and those that did not.