Accompanying the rapid growth of China's economy, environmental issues arouse more and more social attention. The very first step to respond effectively to environmental problems is to evaluate the environmental efficiency precisely. In many production processes, multiple undesirable outputs (e.g., pollutants) are accompanied with desirable outputs. Meanwhile, the undesirable outputs are subject to production restrictions due to widespread environmental regulation. Under these circumstances, the evaluation of environmental performance becomes a hot topic in the literature. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), a frequently used performance evaluation technique,is employed to measure environmental performance. Under the assumption that undesirable output satisfies weak disposability, a non-radial zero sum gains (ZSG)-DEA model, which enhances the existing models by switching from a single undesirable output to multiple undesirable outputs,is put forward. In terms of proper transformations, the difficulty in solving the proposed model is alleviated, and the infeasibility issue for certain efficient DMUs is circumvented. At last, an empirical application to the evaluation of the environmental efficiencies of 30 administrative regions in China is illustrated (data resource:database of CNKI and China Statistical Yearbook- 2012).The empirical evidence indicates that the ZSG environmental performance of a region is positively correlated with its economic development level. In addition, for the component efficiencies of most regions, the performance of wastewater discharged is higher than that of waste gas emission, and the performance of solid wastes produced is lowest among them. The result implies these regions should pay more attention on the control of solid wastes produced. Last but not the least, all the considered regions in China show decreasing returns-to-scale in economic productivity. All findings suggest that adjustment and promotion of industrial structure is critical and essential, which also matches the current policy of supply-side structural reform promoted by the Chinese government.
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