| Summary: | There has been strict environmental legislation that aims at protecting the environment from various detrimental actions. Besides, there have been increasing concerns on resources consumption as well as economic developments. These turn out to be major drivers for a growing amount of countries to strive towards a reduction in the quantity of solid waste that are being sent to the landfills as well as to enhance diversion and recycling. Furthermore, there have been concerted efforts not only on lowering the incessant increase in the aggregate waste production but also on improving the awareness of the citizens on the need for waste reduction. Consequently, various viable measures that can be exploited have been the main concerns worldwide. Besides, different countries are reviewing the waste management financial mechanisms and giving more considerations to the environmental policy. Conventionally, general tax payments or levies are used by a lot of countries to fund their waste services. This approach fails to be fair enough to provide an objective link between the actual individual waste production and costs charged for waste disposal. As a result, the citizens have little or no motivational incentive to be conscious of the produced waste quantity by the conventional approach. An alternative approach to this is differentiated fee systems known as pay-as-you-throw (PAYT). The PAYT has been receiving growing attention under the waste reduction goal due to the fair proportionality between waste management costs and amount of produced waste. This dissertation presents overviews of PAYT across the world. The main aim of this dissertation is to analyze the opportunities and challenges of PAYT in the World so as to study its effectiveness not only in waste reduction but also in offering fair proportionality between waste management costs and actual amount of produced waste. To achieve the research objectives, the dissertation presents results of research on municipal waste management in some parts of the world. Moreover, the dissertation emphasizes mainly on the effects of different municipal solid waste charging systems not only on separating but also on recycling efforts of the respective households and municipalities. Furthermore, different relevant waste charging systems are considered along with the applicable ideologies of the municipal legislations in an attempt to study the behavior of different municipalities and households under alternative waste treatment/charging schemes. In addition, results of surveys conducted on different municipalities and households across the world is presented. Based on the results, it is inferred that the generated waste is comparatively low in municipalities where PAYT charging scheme is being implemented due to the fact that people tend to separate their waste and generate lesser residual waste. Also, some factors that influence adequate waste separation are presented. The analyzed factors can be of great help in policy recommendations for the PAYT charging systems introduction and implementation in various countries. In addition, a number of PAYT systems related issues such as legislation, design, implementation and impact are discussed. The analysis carried out in different countries, about the PAYT results, shows that PATY systems implementation can result into 15–30% rise in recycling as well as 30–40% reduction in waste to landfill.
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