A model using home appliance ownership data to evaluate recycling policy performance

Under the principle of Extended Producer Responsibility, Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration established a new office in 1998 to collect recycling fees from producers and distribute subsidies to recyclers. Although, in general, the indicators of recycling performance for a program include the amount of waste for reuse, recovery and recycling during the previous decade, the collection rates, or return rates, of the due-recycled items are in fact regarded as being the only factors of concern to the various interests in Taiwan. As we define a collection rate as the amount of a particular waste product collected divided by the amount of the same waste product generated during the same year, the key element in the calculation of the collection rate is the amount of waste product generated, which is merely an estimate with little data for confirmation, especially for products with longer life spans, such as automobiles and electrical and electronic equipment. Past studies have suggested the adoption of survival analysis for a product that is combined with sales data to estimate the amount of the product that will be discarded during a particular year. In our project, from another perspective, we use the principle of mass balance and the annual ownership data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics at the central government level to estimate the generated amounts of waste products. Our model provides a simple and reliable method of waste estimation to further evaluate the performance of the recycling policy in a country.