Assessing Production and Separate Waste Collection in Italian Municipalities: A Comparative Study of Composite Indicators for the Caserta Province

This study presents an exploratory analysis of the circular economy in the municipalities of the Caserta province, focusing on the construction of a composite indicator of production and separate waste collection (PROSEWA) for the year 2021 (ISPRA), using five different aggregation methods. The PROSEWA composite indicator — interpreted as a synthetic measure of waste collection performance aligned with the broader goals of circular economy and recycling policies — is based on data for separately collected waste fractions, as well as on several key contextual factors that may influence municipal waste collection. These include: the percentage of artificially covered land, the ratio between the number of local units of active businesses, the resident population, and the migratory balance per 1,000 inhabitants. Five different methods are employed to construct the PROSEWA indicator: four aggregation techniques — the Mazziotta–Pareto index, the arithmetic mean, the weighted arithmetic mean (with weights derived from PCA component loadings), and the geometric mean — and one efficiency-based technique, Data Envelopment Analysis The study also evaluates the composite indicator in terms of internal consistency, coherence, and reliability with respect to the underlying sub-indicators. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the composite indicator to the chosen aggregation method is examined through a functional representation of the five resulting indicators, while a heatmap is used to visualise their discriminatory power across municipalities.