Waste-to-energy: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Plants earn gate fees for taking rubbish plus sales of power and heat, so local waste policy matters more than any commodity. Fuel quality varies widely, and the alternatives are landfill, recycling, and coal in cement kilns.
No public price Waste-to-energy has no public monthly price series: Earnings are local gate fees and power tariffs; no traded price.What its price moves with
Most incinerators burn waste in a boiler and drive a steam turbine. The steam conditions are kept modest to limit corrosion, so efficiency is lower than in coal plants. This route has no price series, so no statistics are shown.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Cement kilns burn refuse-derived fuel, tyres and plastics in place of coal, and their very high temperatures destroy harmful compounds. Cement output and kiln fuel costs drive demand for this waste fuel, notably in India and Europe.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Waste-derived fuel replaces coal in kilns and some power plants, so dear coal raises the value of waste fuel. Cheap coal makes the extra handling cost of waste harder to justify.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Food and farm waste can be digested into biogas and upgraded to biomethane instead of burned. This route competes for organic waste, and gas prices and green gas subsidies decide which is chosen.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.In northern Europe, incinerators feed district heating networks and earn much of their income from heat. Without a heat network, plants sell only power and are far less efficient. In India and most of Asia, plants sell power only.
No public price for district heating and cooling networks, so the link is explained in words only.Used lubricating oil is a waste that can be burned for energy or re-refined into new base oil. Crude oil prices set the value of virgin base oil and of the fuels it replaces, so they decide which route pays.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.