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The European Union advocates a plastic waste recycling rate of more than 55%. Even for the Netherlands, which has already invested heavily in recycling plastic waste of households, it will still be a challenge to meet this target. The preferred solution to fulfil this target in the Netherlands is implementing separate collection schemes at the curbside, although some municipalities invested in post-separation. We show, based on data for 2013–2014, that post-collection separation is an advisable alternative, with an increased separation of plastic waste compared with home separation. This is even slightly the case if home separation is combined with a unit-based pricing system for unsorted waste and with a frequent door-to-door collection of plastic waste. Moreover, there are indications that the cost effectiveness of recycling plastic waste increases if post separation is chosen. In addition, some claim that unit-based pricing of unsorted waste is important to create an awareness effect to buy less packaging material. However, based on the combination of post separation and unit-based pricing, we have no indication for such awareness effect as the price effect on the amount of plastic waste is insignificantly small.

AbstractThe European Union advocates a plastic waste recycling rate of more than 55%. Even for the Netherlands, which has already invested heavily in recycling plastic waste of households, it will still be a challenge to meet this target. The preferred solution to fulfil this target in the Netherlands is implementing separate collection schemes at the curbside, although some municipalities invested in post-separation. We show, based on data for 2013–2014, that post-collection separation is an advisable alternative, with an increased separation of plastic waste compared with home separation. This is even slightly the case if home separation is combined with a unit-based pricing system for unsorted waste and with a frequent door-to-door collection of plastic waste. Moreover, there are indications that the cost effectiveness of recycling plastic waste increases if post separation is chosen. In addition, some claim that unit-based pricing of unsorted waste is important to create an awareness effect to buy less packaging material. However, based on the combination of post separation and unit-based pricing, we have no indication for such awareness effect as the price effect on the amount of plastic waste is insignificantly small.

The European Union advocates a plastic waste recycling rate of more than 55%. Even for the Netherlands, which has already invested heavily in recycling plastic waste of households, it will still be a challenge to meet this target. The preferred solution to fulfil this target in the Netherlands is implementing separate collection schemes at the curbside, although some municipalities invested in post-separation. We show, based on data for 2013–2014, that post-collection separation is an advisable alternative, with an increased separation of plastic waste compared with home separation. This is even slightly the case if home separation is combined with a unit-based pricing system for unsorted waste and with a frequent door-to-door collection of plastic waste. Moreover, there are indications that the cost effectiveness of recycling plastic waste increases if post separation is chosen. In addition, some claim that unit-based pricing of unsorted waste is important to create an awareness effect to buy less packaging material. However, based on the combination of post separation and unit-based pricing, we have no indication for such awareness effect as the price effect on the amount of plastic waste is insignificantly small.

Actual cost of services of local entities (CESEL, in Spanish) is the name of a new official source of statistics in Spain, provided by Ministry of Finance and Civil Service, which intends to bring some transparency to a very obscure question: the real costs of local public services, in this case, the collection costs of municipal solid waste (MSW). The study analyzes the factors that determine solid waste collection costs in 2014, using a cross-sectional dataset of municipalities of the Spanish Mediterranean Arch and Madrid, with special reference to urban development. The results of the regression reveal a positive relation between waste collection costs and factors such as higher wages, coastal municipalities, tourist areas, population and separated collection; in contrast, the increase in urban population density contributes to lower costs of MSW collection, as well as indirect management of the service is cheaper than direct public delivery. ; This work was supported by the Office of the Vice President of Research and Knowledge Transfer of the University of Alicante (Patricia Fernández-Aracil has a scholarship for The Training of University Teachers from the University of Alicante) and by the University Institute of Water and Environmental Sciences of the University of Alicante.

In this paper, I investigate to what extent the cross-country variation in nominal interest rates can be explained as being due to governments' optimal response to economic conditions such as tax collection costs, tax evasion and government consumption needs. In particular, I study the effects of costly income taxes in the presence of an informal sector on the solution to a Ramsey problem in a general equilibrium framework. Unlike most of the previous analyses of optimal inflationary finance, the model postulates that conventional taxes carry collection costs whereas flat money can be printed costlessly. For some countries, I measure tax collection costs, use the tax eva- sion estimates reported in the literature, and then calculate the optimal interest rate based on the model. Comparison of the actual and optimal interest rates demonstrates that the model can in fact partly explain the observed deviations from the Friedman Rule. I also show that allowing cross-country differences in the elasticity of substitution between formal and informal sectors can increase the model's explanatory power.

This article assesses the benefits and alleged costs of ballot collection on Indian reservations. Using the conceptual frame of the “cost of voting,” the research analyzes the impact of ballot collection by examining trends in vote-by-mail programs, socioeconomic variables, distance to polls and mail locations, and US Postal Service delivery on Indian reservations. It then uses a statistical analysis to test the claim that ballot collection leads to voter fraud. Our analysis reveals that ballot collection offers significant opportunities to reduce inequality in voter costs for Native American voters but finds no support for the hypothesis that ballot collection leads to fraud. These findings have significant implications for the voting rights of Native Americans, who tend to rely on ballot collection more than other voters. This research also offers a modification to the concept of voter costs.

Wireless sensor networks represent an important component of distributed pervasive computing infrastructure supporting a range of applications including health,military, environmental monitoring, civil structure monitoring, smart homes, etc. The primary factor driving such pervasive real-world applications is availability of data from sensors distributed in the environment. Traditional way of collecting data is to transmit the data from sensors to a collection point using wireless radio communications. However, the traditional approach is expensive and not always efficient. This thesis addresses a major challenge of cost-efficient collection of data from wireless sensor networks. Our data collection philosophy is to use mobile devices as sensor data collectors. The use of mobile devices as mobile data mules facilitates the formation of a mobile access network that can be used by sensors to connect to the external world. We propose, investigate, develop and validate a sensor data collection framework called sGaRuDa which enables interoperable capabilities and takes advantage of existing communication and hardware capabilities of the mobile data mule platforms enabling them to collect sensor data on-the-run. The sGaRuDa framework incorporates intelligent mobile data mule allowing them to dynamically make data collection and delivery decisions. The sGaRuDa framework and the corresponding data collection algorithms are targeted at sensor networks that use short range radio communication technologies like Bluetooth. We have also proposed, implemented and validated a novel three dimensional k-Nearest Neighbour query-based sensor data collection approach called 3D-KNN to address broadcast-based sensor network communication architectures. The 3D-KNN facilitates multi-hop data collection from infrastructure-less wireless sensor networks (e.g. Zigbee). We propose, develop, implement and validate a dynamic smart spaces modelling approach called Ranked-Context Spaces (R-CS). Our smart spaces modelling approach is driven by the notion of situation modelling and reasoning about context. Ranked-Context Spaces is capable of computing situation-based smart spaces model taking into account changing contextual information. R-CS is proposed as an extension to Context Spaces theory. The thesis presents implementation and evaluation details of the proposed sGaRuDa framework and the 3D-KNN algorithm. We have demonstrated the feasibility and cost-efficiency of the sGaRuDa system framework in real-world environments by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype on a range of mobile device platforms, namely, Personal Digital Assistants and mobile robot. Extensive evaluation and experimentation have been performed to prove the extent of energy conservation using the proposed data collection framework and the 3D-KNN algorithm. Finally, we have implemented the R-CS system to demonstrate its reasoning ability under uncertainty. Experiments based on synthetic sensor data streams have been performed to evaluate the proposed Context Spaces extensions incorporated into R-CS. During the course of the thesis work, 7 peer-refereed international conference papers, 1 peer-refereed workshop paper and 1 journal paper have been produced. One of the conference papers was awarded a BEST PAPER AWARD.

The healthcare system in Finland has begun routine collection of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) information for patients in hospitals to support more systematic cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). This article describes the systematic collection of HRQoL survey data, and addresses challenges in the implementation of patient surveys and acquisition of cost data in the case hospital. Challenges include problems with incomplete data and undefined management processes. In order to support CEA of hospital treatments, improvements are sought from the process management literature and in the observation of healthcare professionals. The article has been written from an information system and process management perspective, concluding that process ownership, automation of data collection and better staff training are keys to generating more reliable data.