Privatization and market concentration in the US landfill industry 2001–2024: discerning trends using public data

The relationship between privatization and market concentration in public sector industries has garnered significant scholarly attention. However, in comparison to other public sector services, our understanding of changing market structure in waste disposal, an essential public environmental service, is limited. To address this gap, this paper uses the EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) database to examine trends in privatization and market concentration for 1169 landfills between 2001 and 2024. Our analysis confirms earlier findings that landfills are becoming larger and privately owned. Concomitantly, market concentration is high and has been steadily increasing in this sector, as anti-trust interventions failed to foster competition at the national scale. In contrast to other public sectors, waste disposal has also not witnessed reverse privatization. Finally, we argue that a more comprehensive national-level database is needed to better understand regional variations in, and the environmental and economic effects of, increasing market concentration.