PhD Student: Nachammai Lakshmanan; Partner: Environment Agency; Supervisors: Prof. Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay and Dr. Allan Beltran; Department of Economics
Waste Crime refers to the illegal disposal and trading of waste by contravening international, regional or local waste laws. It is an important unresolved problem in England with pervasive consequences on the economy and the environment. The government has lost significant revenue due to tax evasion, and the limited income generated has been diverted towards identifying and punishing offenders and clearing illegally dumped waste. In addition, private land owners are spending enormously to tidy up their lands. Overall, the government has incurred an annual loss of £1 billion due to 34 tones of waste disposed illegally. The illegally disposed waste is adding to the woes of climate change by severely polluting the environment and harming people and wildlife.
Deterrence appears to be insufficient. With an estimated quarter of all waste crimes being reported, in 2022, the EA was able to conduct 2500 investigations, which resulted in 93 prosecutions with fines totalling to £1.2 million.
In this regard, this PhD project aims to support the efforts of the EA in deterring waste crime. It seeks to inform the EA’s enforcement strategies by incorporating behavioral insights to better understand and address waste crime.
Accordingly, the project intends to identify the factors inducing waste crime and examine how existing deterrence strategies of the EA function within the framework of deterrence theory, using data from the NWCS. Also, the study will take an experimental approach to test how sending different forms of messages to offenders on waste disposal and tax evasion influences their behavior, through a lab experiment and a field level study within the jurisdiction of the EA.
Overall, the project, by analysing and refining crime mitigation strategies, aims to recommend customised cost-effective policies to deter waste crime incidents in England, reduce the fiscal loss, and contribute to the existing body of scholarly knowledge on waste crime deterrence.