Do we disaggregate the Waste and Remediation industries and commodities?

[WesIngwersen]

The benchmark IOT have 1 industry and 1 commodity for Waste and Remediation Services, 562000.

USEEIO v2.0 and some later 2.+ versions disaggregate these into 7 industries and 7 commodities.

Part of project https://github.com/orgs/cornerstone-data/projects/6/

Resolved: Yes, we will disaggregate the waste sector.

[jvendries]

Discussion of Waste Disaggregation in USEEIOv2.0+

The text below is meant to serve as a starting point for the discussion on disaggregating the Waste and Remediation services industries and commodities (USEEIO code 562000).

Purpose of Waste Disaggregation

USEEIO disaggregates Waste Management because materials management at end-of-life is one of the main areas of interest for research by public and private organizations (notably EPA). As a single sector, 562000 is too aggregate to allow for targeted analysis or modeling of waste specific end-of-life pathways, to say nothing of specific materials. As a result, USEEIO disaggregates 526000 into 7 distinct subsectors, each representing a distinct pathway and mapped to specific 6-digit NAICS codes. This mapping is shown in the table below.

Table: Mapping of Disaggregated Waste Sectors to NAICS and USEEIO codes

Disaggregated Waste Sector	NAICS Codes	USEEIO Code
Solid waste collection	562111	562111
Hazardous waste collection treatment and disposal	562112, 562211	562HAZ
Solid waste landfilling	562212	562212
Solid waste combustors and incinerators	562213	562213
Remediation services	562910	562910
Material separation/recovery facilities	562920	562920
Other waste collection and treatment services	562119, 562219, 56299	562OTH

The USEEIO codes are the same for the disaggregated waste commodities and industries.

Advantages:

1. Including the disaggregated sectors allows more targeted economic and environmental impacts analysis using the USEEIO model. This is particularly useful for differentiating between environmental profiles of the various disaggregated sectors. For example, when compared to the original waste sector, the landfill and waste combustion sectors have high GHG EFs, whereas the material separation/recovery facilities sector (the stand-in for recycling) has low GHG EFs. This differentiation can be made for other indicators as well, not just GHGs

2. Additionally, the disaggregation served as a first step in additional waste modeling done via several HIO models (MUIO, WIO) that explored these pathways in more detail for food and concrete waste management.

Disadvantages:
There are 2 main drawbacks caused by the inclusion of the disaggregated waste sectors.

1. Additional effort required to include the disaggregation functions in the codebase. The fact that these additions are non-trivial and that there is (as far as I’m aware) no analogous functionality in the ceda-usa codebase are the reasons why we are not prioritizing this feature for the 2026 Cornerstone model release.

2. Additional data and data processing requirements for creating the disaggregated waste sectors. The disaggregation functionality itself can be used to disaggregate any sector provided the balancing restrictions of the matrices are upheld. However, the inputs to the code require additional processing beyond just obtaining the relevant data. The data processing, while streamlined, was not automated because: A) the level of effort in automating the processing was higher than doing it manually, and B) automation of the data processing for the disaggregated waste sectors is not transferable to disaggregation of other sectors.

Note that the USEEIOv2.0 paper discusses the disaggregation method, but below I provide a brief overview of the disaggregation procedure in useeior to provide additional context for this discussion.

Disaggregation procedure in useeior

The inputs for the waste disaggregation in useeior are:

1. A model spec with a pointer to a disaggregation .yml
2. A disaggregation .yml file with pointers to 3 csv files:
   a) A Sectors.csv file which defines the NAICS-to-USEEIO code mappings for the new (disaggregated) sectors.
   b) A Use.csv file which provides the allocation values between the old (aggregate) and new (disaggregated) sectors for the Use table.
   c) A Make.csv file which provides the allocation values between the old (aggregate) and new (disaggregated) sectors for the Make table.

The values for the Use and Make .csv files are calculated as follows:

1. Use table disaggregation:
a) RCRA: The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database collects data on hazardous waste from cradle to grave. This dataset is used to estimate the Use table intersection of the newly disaggregated sectors, i.e., the use of disaggregated waste management commodities by disaggregated waste management sectors. Note that this still uses 2012 data for the 2017 disaggregation as we were unable to obtain more recent RCRA data
b) SAS: The Service Annual Survey provides data to estimate the use by the disaggregated industries of the existing (non-disaggregated) commodities. This is used to disaggregate the Use table columns.
c) EC: Economic Census data is used to estimate the use of the disaggregated commodities by existing (non-disaggregated) industries. This is used to disaggregate the Use table rows.

2. Make table disaggregation:
a) The Make table column disaggregation represents production of the newly commodities (columns) by the existing industries (rows, i.e., off-diagonal production of waste management services). Disaggregated based on manual allocations for secondary production of waste management services and balanced using the Use table row totals.
b) The Make table intersection represents the production of disaggregated commodities by the disaggregated industries. This is calculated using the Use table commodity output totals (row totals) - Make table column manual allocations.
c) The Make table row disaggregation represents the production of existing commodities (columns) by the newly disaggregated industries (rows, i.e., off-diagonal production by the waste management services industries). Some values allocated manually; see the 2020 paper. The rest are allocated using the percentages derived from the Use table column for the disaggregated sectors, including the disaggregated intersection.

3. Value added disaggregation:
a) As part of the Use table columns, the values for VA sectors are adjusted to make the Use table column sums match the Make table row sums after disaggregation (i.e., used for balancing).

[sarahcashmanz]

Thanks Jorge, I think we should spend the effort to disaggregate waste. If one of our end target users is states/communities, they are largely using USEEIO for CBEI and/or sustainable materials management programs. This gives us the ability to respond more effectively to waste prevention type programs.

[bl-young]

I believe in the recent 2017 waste disaggregation review I did a comparison of the N matrix values for all sectors with and without a waste disaggregation. My recollection is that this decision primarily impacts the waste sectors themselves, and has limited impact on the N matrix values for all other sectors.

[bl-young]

In #50, I added the comparison of GHG factors for all sectors that differ by more than 1% with and without waste disaggregation. Only two sectors change by more than 3%, S00401/US and 524113/US

Row.names	Greenhouse Gases_waste	Greenhouse Gases_no_waste	comp
211000/US	0.785	0.772	1.017
331110/US	1.475	1.496	0.985
331200/US	0.723	0.733	0.987
331313/US	1.646	1.665	0.988
331510/US	0.499	0.514	0.971
33291A/US	0.265	0.268	0.987
334111/US	0.043	0.042	1.015
336370/US	0.646	0.653	0.989
423600/US	0.116	0.115	1.013
441000/US	0.123	0.121	1.011
446000/US	0.131	0.130	1.012
448000/US	0.147	0.145	1.013
4B0000/US	0.123	0.122	1.011
517A00/US	0.080	0.079	1.011
524113/US	0.054	0.051	1.065
5241XX/US	0.036	0.035	1.022
524200/US	0.027	0.027	1.012
531ORE/US	0.274	0.267	1.027
533000/US	0.060	0.059	1.018
541100/US	0.050	0.049	1.017
541200/US	0.060	0.059	1.016
541610/US	0.074	0.073	1.011
5416A0/US	0.087	0.085	1.017
5419A0/US	0.086	0.085	1.012
550000/US	0.081	0.080	1.013
561100/US	0.099	0.098	1.014
561500/US	0.090	0.088	1.016
611B00/US	0.113	0.112	1.012
621100/US	0.087	0.086	1.012
621200/US	0.064	0.063	1.011
621300/US	0.108	0.106	1.011
623A00/US	0.180	0.178	1.011
624100/US	0.141	0.139	1.012
711100/US	0.092	0.090	1.013
711500/US	0.036	0.035	1.011
812100/US	0.148	0.146	1.013
812300/US	0.188	0.185	1.015
812900/US	0.128	0.126	1.012
813B00/US	0.139	0.143	0.972
S00401/US	0.415	0.513	0.81

[MoLi7]

In CEDA, we currently inherit BEA’s consolidated waste management sector (562000) as the single waste-management sector across all countries.

• For the US, this is straightforward since we build directly from BEA’s standard taxonomy.
• For non-US economies, available IO and environmental accounts typically provide only coarse—and often not meaningfully distinct—breakouts for waste management (e.g., a simple split between recycling and other waste services). Today, we aggregate these to a single 562000 sector for consistency.

If we disaggregate 562000 within the US, we do not introduce additional crosswalk complexity for non-US systems. We can use the same structural reflection approach to disaggregate non-US IO tables and GHG accounts into a compatible 562***-level split without requiring country-specific taxonomy mappings.

Given this, I support moving forward with disaggregating waste management. It improves granularity in the US and can be extended globally with a consistent, method-driven procedure.

[MoLi7]

Here is some context about waste management in non-US taxonomies and how they are mapped to 562000 - waste management in CEDA.

1. China's taxonomy contains the following waste related sectors, all of which are mapped to 562000
   a. Scrap and waste recycling products
   b. Water conservancy
   c. Ecological protection and environmental governance
2. UK's taxonomy contains the following waste related sectors, all of which are mapped to 562000
   a. Waste collection, treatment and disposal services; materials recovery services
   b. Remediation services and other waste management services
3. Japan's taxonomy contains the following waste related sectors, all of which are mapped to 562000
   a. Reuse and recycling
   b. Waste management services (public corporation)
   c. Waste management services
4. Korea's taxonomy contains the following waste related sectors, all of which are mapped to 562000
   a. Public waste collection, transport, and treatment (or disposal)
   b. Waste collection, transportation and treatment
   c. Resource Recycling Services
5. other countries' taxonomy in fact bundles water supply and sewerage together with waste management and remediation activities, so it's a 1-to-1 mapping to 562000

[bl-young]

Consensus is that yes we will proceed to implement the waste disaggregation for the US, extended globally where feasible.