Perception of Environmental Policies for Solid Waste Management firms in India

Abstract

Pollution is generally understood as the adverse change in the natural environment due to the newline introduction of contaminants, which could be in the form of chemicals or energy or both. Human newline activities also produce environmental waste or pollution as a by-product. There are negative newline social, environmental and economic effects due to mismanagement of waste. In a developing newline economy, the basic solid waste management usually consists of certain important elements such newline as generation of waste and its storage, sweeping of roads and maintaining cleanliness at public newline places, segregation at the household level, removal for reuse and recycling. newline Literature Review, Objectives and Research Methodology: The conceptual framework for this newline study is drawn from established work on environmental policy. Environmental Policy consists of newline five major components, viz. Regulations and Standards, economic incentives, voluntary newline negotiations, green taxes and negative taxes. This study tries to explore the relationship between newline environmental policy and firms engaged in solid waste management (SWM) with a view to newline encourage such firms which also create positive environmental externalities. For this, the newline exploratory approach is used and ten firms in the SWM industry in India are taken as case newline studies. A qualitative approach to data collection and analysis is used and after content analysis, newline the findings are grouped under major themes which also correlate to the five components of newline environmental policy as above. newline Major Findings: The main findings are split into two broad areas- technology and policy. newline Technology plays a very important role and needs to be tackled separately through policies newline aimed at encouraging demand for SWM products. Simultaneously, there need to be tax and non- newline tax incentives to encourage Research and Development in SWM. Transfer of technology in somexiii newline cases can be an acceptable strategy which can be supported through reduced import tariffs and newline duties. newline Conclusions: Policy related suggestions pertain to increasing awareness among the waste newline generators and processors of the need to segregate waste at source and to process the waste in the newline segregated manner. One suggestion was to centralize all waste processors in one place near the newline dumping area so that there is synergy of production and distribution. The most important finding newline was that while the government needs to focus on regulating the behavior of waste generators and newline processors, the focus needs to be on helping convert the perception of waste from a public bad to newline that of an excludable good. If waste is seen as a resource, it can change the amount of money newline spent on managing the same. This can happen by creating awareness among the waste generators newline about the potential of waste and simultaneously create infrastructure through SWM firms to newline create a demand for this waste newline