Ist Hausmüllentsorgung eine Dienstleistung?

摘要

Although municipal waste disposal is commonly classified as service production, this proposition hasn’t been verified so far. As also analogies to material goods’ production emerge, the core character of waste disposal has to be analyzed more in detail. It is the aim of this paper to investigate the service character of municipal waste disposal by separating it into its main sub-processes. Therefore, the conceptual analysis identifies the external factor and the essentially beneficial processes. Moreover, we illustrate to what extent the classification depends on the citizen’s involvement (full vs. partial service) and the institutional arrangements. Based on the results of this paper, in the end it becomes more obvious, for which waste disposal processes models from service management science can be applied.