Page 354 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 4

CPS2277 Iris M H Yeung et al.

A study of the factors affecting Hong Kong
residents’ willingness to pay for waste disposal
by Logit Models
Iris M H Yeung, William Chung
Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong

Abstract
A survey was conducted to study the knowledge and attitude of residents
towards three government proposed policies (waste charge, landfill extension
and building a new incinerator) for waste management in Hong Kong. About
one third of the respondents are willing to pay (WTP) less than HK$30 (36.1%),
exactly HK$30 (32.4%) and more than HK$30 (31.4%) for waste disposal
respectively. The average WTP amount is HK$38.4 per month. Logit models
indicate that the degree of support for waste charge and new incinerator
policies, daily waste disposal amount, age and income significantly affect WTP
for the contrast between “above HK$30” and “below HK$30”. Multinomial logit
model suggests that only degree of support for waste charge policy,
knowledge on landfill fullness and construction time for new incinerator
significantly affect WTP for the contrast between “exactly HK$30” and “below
HK$30”. Implications of these findings will be discussed.

Keywords
Environment; Multinomial and Ordinal Logit Models; Solid Waste; Willingness
to pay; Hong Kong

1. Introduction
Solid waste management is a big challenge to the government authorities
throughout the world (Ma and Hipel 2016, Vergara and Tchobanoglous 2012).
Since 2005, the Hong Kong government has launched various waste
reductions at source programs, such as source separation of domestic,
commercial and industrial waste; the implementation of construction waste
disposal charging scheme; producer responsibility scheme for local e-waste
reduction and environmental levy scheme on plastic shopping bags. However,
the amount of waste in Hong Kong is expected to increase along with the
population and economic growth, and consumption patterns of people. But
the three landfills that are mainly used for waste disposal are nearly filled up.
To solve the waste management problem, the Hong Kong government
proposed three policies in May 2013, namely waste charge, landfill extension
and building a new incinerator.
A questionnaire survey was carried out by the authors to understand the
knowledge and attitude of residents towards the three proposed policies.

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