Projection of Trends in Solid Waste Generation: The Case of Domestic Waste in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

摘要

Waste generation projections inform waste policy formulation and are an indispensable process in wastenmanagement planning. However, not only is valid waste generation projection difficult, their reliability is alsondifficult to prove. Between the two major methodological approaches in forecasting municipal solid wastengeneration, the time-series approach only uses past data and their distribution to determine future waste trends.nThe factor model, on the other hand, explains and predicts waste trends with explanatory variables such asnsocioeconomic factors of the waste generators. This latter approach not only aims at making predictions onnwaste quantities, it also aims at unveiling hypothetical causal relationships between factors for the prediction ofnwaste quantities. In this article, results of waste generation projection studies conducted between 1989 and 1999nby Hong Kong’s environmental authority on domestic waste growth were verified against actual waste data forndetermining the accuracy of these predictions. It was then followed by the use of a factor-model based technique,nautoregression, to forecast domestic waste growth for Hong Kong based on historical (1979–2007) waste datanand other socioeconomic factors. Although the use of multiple factor autoregression model appeared to rectifynthe overestimation tendency of classical linear regression model used by Hong Kong’s environmental authority,na number of empirical constraints that are also typical of other factor-model-based techniques were encountered.nIt is essential that waste policy makers are aware of, these constraints when they are making decisions based onnthe results from such models.