Determinants of a throwaway society - A sustainable consumption issue

The purpose of this paper is to present a clearer understanding of how several key socio-economic variables impact municipal solid waste (MSW). Although the variables of interest arise from deeply entrenched micro-economic behaviors at the household level, the analysis can be extrapolated to the international level. Two of the variables, which are a time factor and a consumption discount rate, are empirically tested with an international dataset and have been found to be significant predictors of MSW per capita.