The carrot or the stick: individual adaption against varying institutional arrangements

Abstract

This study employs a unique household-level data-set to investigate the effectiveness of various waste separation policies under consideration of local socioeconomic contexts. Our results confirm previous findings that most demographic factors are generally not statistically significant. The findings suggest that waste separation knowledge, social capital, free provision of sortable containers and community collecting recyclables are positively associated with household involvement in waste separation. More importantly, while an increase in the garbage fee motivates non-sorting households to separate their waste into two categories of recyclables and non-recyclables, it also crowds out households’ preexisting motivations for sorting waste into three or more categories. The introduction of a garbage fee indeed substitutes rather than complements free provision of sortable containers and community collection of recyclables. Apart from actively fostering the creation of social capital, local authorities should, therefore, comprehensively design a compatible policy mix to adjust and optimize current management schemes for enhancing waste management practices.

Keywords:

• household waste source separation
• policy instruments
• substitution effect
• crowding-out effect
• choice experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Notice on Release the First Batch of Waste Separation Exemplary City Issued by Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China and Other Ministries (2015).

2. Among the eight pretest bids, four respondents indicated ‘Not being convinced about the effectiveness of waste source separation’, three respondents indicated ‘Don't believe the program would actually happen’, one respondent indicated ‘the government should do this’.

3. See Table A1 in Appendix (online supplemental data) for the definition and coding of all variables.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number 14 ZDA070]; the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China [grant number 20130101110144].