The shortage of land for solid waste disposal has been a very important problem in many developed countries. To solve this problem, we must decrease the amount of waste. Various kinds of policies as countermeasures have been implemented in such countries. We compare six household waste recycling policies with respect to the social welfare levels in a partial equilibrium framework: the status quo, unit pricing, recycling subsidy, advance disposal and recycling fee, deposit/refund system and producer take-back requimement with unit pricing.
In this paper, we obtained the following results. Unit pricing and deposit/refund system and, producer take-back requirement with unit pricing are the first best policies. However, the orders of the social welfare associated with the other policies depend on the constant marginal dinposal cost. This result is important because we can not always implement the first best policies for some reasons. For example, unit pricing can be faced with the political opposition to what is perceived as a new tax, and deposit/refund system may be suffered from its high transaction cost.