This paper summarizes the economics perspective on recycling of municipal solid waste. The first section reviews recent data on recycling rates in the United States and across all OECD countries. The OECD data suggest the average aggregate recycling rate across member countries appears to have...

The pursuit of shifting Slovakia towards a circular economy is met with a multitude of obstacles, including the pervasive consumerist mindset among Slovakians. This mindset favors packaged food, leading to its improper disposal in municipal waste instead of being recycled. Furthermore, the...

Large volumes of e-waste collected under formal schemes in high-income countries are still processed informally in developing ones, despite continuous policy efforts to reverse this trend. This paper shows that the persistence of informal e-waste processing is a consequence of how global waste...