Recycling of Farm Organic Resources and the Environmental Evaluation in Local Economy

—— An Estimation of Linkage Effect in Hokkaido Region ——

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the local environmental impact of recycling organic resources in agricultural sector in terms of waste treatments and CO₂ emission by focusing on Hokkaido region in which there are much more farm organic resources than the other regions in Japan.
We estimate the input-output model for Hokkaido region considered the recycling activities of farm organic resources. Using the Leontief inverse matrix within and between economic activities and waste treatments, the findings are as follows :
Recycling farm organic resources in the agricultural sector (except livestock) contributes to the reduction in incineration requirement of waste by 321 tons and the reduction in landfill requirement of waste by 162 tons compared with the case in which the resources are not recycled. On the other hand, it induces the increase in CO₂ emission of 19 thousand tons. The result of CO₂ emission implies that the effect caused by the increase in “recycling sectors of animal dung and urine”, “electricity” and “coal & petroleum” exceeds the effect caused by the decrease in “chemical fertilizer” in Hokkaido region.
These results imply that energy recovery process of waste and increase of transport efficiency are also needed for reducing local environmental burden more effectively.

JEL classification: Q53, Q51, R15