Who Holds the Keys to the Management of Municipal Waste and Which Locks of Municipal Sustainability do they Fit Into?

Abstract

Municipalities seem to be indispensable in reaching sustainability at the local level while waste management (WM) plays a crucial role. The WM system is influenced by various variables with the questionable possibility of municipal interventions. The holistic nature of the phenomena resulted in the usage of the redundancy analysis investigating 9 independent determinants and 8 dependent factors of the municipal WM simultaneously. The research was conducted on a sample of 125 municipalities from two Slovak regions, revealing 6 clusters of similarly behaving vectors. Well-defined linkages were found among spatial factors such as altitude, administrative affiliation, and presence of the marginalized groups of inhabitants or in the case of socioeconomic factors such as the number of inhabitants, fees for waste removal, and the creation of illegal landfills. Moreover, the second cluster is negatively correlated with the share of removed illegal landfills and in-house services in the WM and is almost independent of local voluntary activities in the WM and own waste recycling. Various magnitudes of the variables were observed while the number of inhabitants belong to the strongest. Thus, the research has proven that municipalities have the keys to the tools that can influence the analysed ties and support municipal sustainability.