Environmental and Resource Economics 13: 473–491, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 473 Household Waste Management in a Swedish Municipality: Determinants of Waste Disposal, Recycling and Composting 1 THOMAS STERNER and HELEEN BARTELINGS Department of Economics, University of Göteborg, Vasagatan 1, Gothenburg, Sweden Accepted 21 April 1998 Abstract. This paper analyzes waste disposal, recycling and composting in a municipality in south- west Sweden. In 1994, Varberg introduced a weight-based billing system for household waste charg- ing 1 kr/kg of waste and at the same time recycling centers were set up and a “green shopping” campaign was launched. This led to a significant reduction in waste collected and increased recycling. This study had access to actual measured data on waste disposal at the household level for a residen- tial area called Tvååker, in addition to survey data for the same households. This makes it possible to carry out a more reliable and more detailed analysis than has been previously possible, particularly with respect to attitudinal variables. The most important determinants of each individual household’s waste were composting of kitchen waste, living area, age and attitudes concerning the difficulty of recycling various materials. Separate sections look at composting behaviour, at willingness to pay for sound waste management and for the sake of comparison three other municipalities are also studied. The main finding is that economic incentives, although important, are not the only driving force behind the observed reduction in municipal waste: Given the proper infrastructure that facilitates recycling, people are willing to invest more time than can be motivated purely by savings on their waste management bill. Key words: waste management, recycling, incentives JEL classification: D12, H31, Q20 1. Introduction The management of solid waste from households is important for various reasons. One of these is that landfill space is becoming a scarce resource in many countries. More profound is perhaps the concern for ecological damage from hazardous com- ponents in the waste collected by the municipality will not automatically alleviate the concern about the spread of hazardous waste into the environment. To the contrary: thoughtless construction of waste handling tariffs might even have the effect of encouraging illicit dumping, burning or other improper disposal: see for instance Fullerton and Kinnaman (1995). This study focuses on the determinants of total household waste and the effects of unit price payments combined with better access to recycling possibilities. One