E. Dijkgraaf and R. H. J. M. Gradus 1. 1 Introduction In 2004 Elbert
Dijkgraaf nished a PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch waste market' at the
Erasmus University Rotterdam. It was interesting that not much is
published about the waste market, although it is a very important sector
from an economic and environmental viewpoint. In 2006 we were
participants at a very interesting conf- ence on Local Government
Reform: privatization and public-private collaboration in Barcelona
organized by Germa ` Bel. It was interesting to notice that researchers
from Spain, Scandinavian countries, the UK and the USA were studying
this issue as well. From this we brought forward the idea to publish a
book about the waste market. Because of its legal framework we want to
focus on Europe. In this chapter we give an introduction to this book.
In the next paragraph we present a short overview of the waste
collection market. Since 1960 the importance of the waste sector has
increased substantially both in the waste streams and the costs of waste
collection and treatment. Furthermore, we discuss policy measures to
deal with these increases and give an overview of the different measures
in - countries. In the last paragraph we present different chapters of
our book. 1. 2 Empirical Update of the Waste Collection Market The Dutch
case provides a nice example why studying the waste market is int-
esting from an economic point of view.
