ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Who Holds the Keys to the Management
of Municipal Waste and Which Locks of Municipal
Sustainability do they Fit Into?
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1
Institute of European Policies and Public Administration, Faculty of European Studies and Regional Development,
the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Tr. A. Hlinku 2, 949 01 Nitra, Slovakia
2
Institute of Environmental Management, Faculty of European Studies and Regional Development,
the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Tr. A. Hlinku 2, 949 01 Nitra, Slovakia
3
Institute of Law, Faculty of European Studies and Regional Development, the Slovak University of Agriculture
in Nitra, Tr. A. Hlinku 2, 949 01 Nitra, Slovakia
Submission date: 2023-07-18
Final revision date: 2023-08-07
Acceptance date: 2023-08-26
Online publication date: 2023-11-24
Publication date: 2024-01-22
Corresponding author
Alexander Fehér
Institute of Environmental Management, Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Tr. A. Hlinku 2, 94976, Nitra, Slovak Republic
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2024;33(2):1017-1031
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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.