Industry

Waste Management

As urban populations multiply, the need for resilient waste management solutions becomes paramount to ensuring our cities’ sustainable growth. Using sophisticated economic analysis techniques, governments and the private sector can solve the tangible, and complex, issues faced when managing waste, recycling and emissions, as important building blocks of the circular economy.

Talk to our waste team

Like many other sectors of the economy, there is a desire to fundamentally transform the management of waste to make better use of scarce resources and reduce environmental harms. There are global and local efforts to reduce the amount of waste being generated, to increase waste recovery and re-use and to embed the sector into a wider circular economy.

Competing priorities in waste management lead to complex trade-offs

Governments are using a number of levers to improve reuse and recycling of materials, including better kerbside waste separation, container deposit schemes, bans on exporting unprocessed waste and support for industry to develop recycling infrastructure.

At Frontier Economics, we are working with governments and the industry on understanding the opportunities and barriers to achieve this common vision and finding solutions. Economics provides useful tools and insights – whether it is:

understanding how to change the incentives of firms and consumers to change their waste behaviour such as through regulation, pricing or other incentives;
to understand the costs and benefits of new infrastructure or policy; or
to model more complex interactions and trade-offs such as between the emissions and costs of different waste management solutions.

It’s a complex problem. One that our economic consultants have been working hard to solve from multiple angles for over 20 years.

Data and economic advisory to navigate the waste management landscape

As the complexities of waste management continue to grow alongside rising populations and urban sprawl, our waste management economic consulting services offer critical support for the journey toward sustainable cities and economies. Making the complex issues easier to navigate using sound data and economic analysis, such as:

Public sector

Using cost benefit analysis to evaluate the impacts of waste and resource recovery policy and regulations on the community.

Designing and advising on incentive mechanisms to encourage waste reduction and circular economy outcomes.

Assessing the extent of competition in waste markets.

Advising on the costs and benefits of integrating waste services with water, wastewater, recycled water, stormwater, electricity, gas and telecommunications and digital connectivity services.

Private sector

Analysing emissions from landfill and thermal waste-to-energy.

Developing financial and procurement models in the waste sector.

Applying behavioural economics to identify ways of achieving sustained, desired behavioural change.

Advising on the economics of biogas in the context of understanding the value of gas in a hydrogen future and for power generation.