Measuring spatial repercussion effects of regional waste management

The present paper proposes an analytical framework for measuring the spatial pollution repercussion effects of regional waste management. The empirical analysis using the 1995 nine-region waste input–output table reveals that as the regional population size become larger, the intraregional waste treatment level directly and indirectly induced by a person's consumption behaviour tends to be large due to economies of scale. In contrast, we especially find that the indirect household contributions per capita of the Chugoku and Shikoku region were, conversely, about 1.4 times larger than that of the Kanto region, because of the differences in the regional commodity consumption patterns. In comparing the actual economic system in 1995 with the hypothetical complete intraregional waste treatment system, we also find that the latter system increased total waste landfill by 18,103 tonnes, which amounts to 0.03% of the total waste landfill, revealing the location advantage of intermediate inputs for waste treatment activities and regional technological differences.