Applied Micro Seminar : Every Tuesday
Time: 12:15 pm – 13:30 pm
Date: September, 23th
Room : 3001

Matt GORDON (Dumps)

Abstract :

“Solid waste is rapidly accumulating in the environment, however research on the causes and consequences of this type of pollution is difficult due to a lack of data. This paper quantifies the extent to which the international trade in waste contributes to global solid waste pollution. We develop methods that use unrepresentative, crowd-sourced data on informal landfills, combined with machine learning on satellite imagery to create a globally representative time series of open-air waste sites. Our approach is based on verifying the ground-truth status of an optimally chosen subset of the machine-learning model’s predictions to debias our estimates and maximize efficiency. Our results show a dramatic increase in open-air landfills globally after China banned imports of waste in 2018. The increase is particularly pronounced in countries that saw large increases in imports after 2018, suggesting that traded waste plays a role in overwhelming local waste management systems and the subsequent leakage of waste into the environment. Our methodological contributions are valuable for generating descriptive statistics and measuring causal effects on rare land-use types.”

Organizers:
Benoît SCHMUTZ (Pôle économie du CREST)
Clément MALGOUYRES (Pôle économie du CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST