Identifying the Socioeconomic Determinants of Industrial Hazardous Waste Generation: South Korea as a Case Study
31 Pages Posted: 23 May 2023
Abstract
The South Korean government announced its goal to reduce industrial hazardous waste (IHW) as the first step in its transition to a circular economy. Moreover, as IHW trade between countries is regulated by the Basel Convention, efficient management of IHW within the country has become essential. Despite the need to make concrete environmental policy proposals based on valid reasons, there is still a lack of fundamental information on the determinants of IHW generation, which hinders the effectiveness of IHW policies. Therefore, this study established extended input-output models for IHW to characterize IHW generation and applied the structural decomposition analysis to identify the socioeconomic determinants contributing to the increase and decrease of IHW generation in South Korea between 2008 and 2018. The results show that among the performed seven factors, consumption, export, and direct IHW intensity change of ‘Chemical’, ‘Electronic and electrical equipment’, and ‘Basic metal’ are the dominant determinants for IHW growth, while technology change, including technological structure change and direct IHW intensity change, of ‘Basic metal’ and ‘Other service’ is the key point for IHW reduction. In addition, in terms of the supply chain, the influence of indirect IHW growth due to the expansion of exports and consumption contributes almost twice as much to the increase in IHW as direct IHW growth. These insightful findings of this study contribute to navigating a direction for the South Korean government in establishing holistic and customized IHW-related environmental policies by considering the expanded global system boundaries, technology change, and purchasers’ consumption patterns as dominant factors.
Keywords: Environmentally-Extended Input-Output analysis, Waste Input-output analysis, Industrial hazardous waste, Structural decomposition analysis, Supply chain, Circular economy
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