Residents’ Willingness to Pay for Household Kitchen Waste Separation Services in Haidian and Dongcheng Districts, Beijing City

Abstract

This paper reports a contingent valuation study on household kitchen waste separation (HKWS) services via willingness to pay (WTP) conducted in the Haidian and Dongcheng districts of Beijing city in 2013. This study focuses on a real program to understand households' attitudes toward HKWS and to estimate the value of HKWS services. The results of this study revealed that 41.4% agreed to accept the proposed price of HKWS services, while 42.2% refused to pay, but with a positive attitude toward the HKWS program. In addition, respondents' WTP for proposed HKWS services is significantly related to the level of bid price and their gender, age and education experience. Attitudinal factors that affect resident WTP were also found. For example, respondents who perceive themselves as having a higher ability to conduct HKWS at the source are more willing to pay for their HKWS services, while respondents who complain of the inconvenience of conducting HKWS show negative WTP. The results also showed that on average each household is willing to pay about US$1.44 per month for HKWS services, which is based on 327 respondents after excluding 64 (16.4% of all sample) who indicated complete opposition to the HKWS program.

Model of Chinese Household Kitchen Waste Separation Behavior: A Case Study in Beijing City

“…In other words, Chinese residents have not been habituated to separating KW. Therefore, this finding can be further explained by the results found by Yuan and Yabe [4]. In their study, residents who had higher positive attitudes towards household KW separation showed a higher willingness to pay for KW separation services.…”

“…In this respect, source separation by the generator has been widely recognized as the crucial way for reducing, reusing, and recycling waste [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Many researchers have identified means of how to successfully conduct source separation in developed countries, such as in Sweden by Dahlén et al [9], and in Spain by Gallardo et al [10,11].…”

“…For convenience, respondents can put their KW in community garbage bins in front of their residential building without time limitations or extra fees.) [3,4,18] have been made by local governments to obtain the residents' cooperation, the program remains largely ineffective [21,22] because of problems such as citizens' resistance, political complexity, and those related to culture. Therefore, understanding the determinants of resident KW separation behavior are key for governments and decision makers to design more effective policies to involve more households join in household KW source separation program.…”

A new funding scheme for MSW management to support WtE program

“…WTP has been used in many waste retribution studies. Among them are WTP for waste sorting management improvement [19,20], WTP for repairment of waste processing construction [21], and WTP to undertake recycle program [22]. WTP in rural areas that have not been connected to electricity has been conducted by [23].…”

“…For the purpose, WTP questionnaire was designed based on [20]. The questionnaire is divided into five parts.…”