The amount of household waste disposed of in Poland, compared with other European Union countries

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to answer the question how individual European Union countries differ from Poland with regard to the amount of household waste disposed of per capita. Two factors affecting the variable have been analysed in the paper: 1) the amount of household refuse generated per inhabitant and 2) the part of waste destined for disposal in the total quantity collected from households. Those two explanatory variables are directly proportional to the response variable. Thus, the smaller the mean volume of waste produced by one person and the lower the disposal rate, the smaller the quantity of waste disposed of per capita in a given country. Causal analysis enables us to answer the question of how the two factors affect the variable considered, namely, the direction and strength of their influence. The logarithmic method was applied to carry out the causal analysis. Data for 2010, 2012, and 2014 have been used for calculations.