Abstract
Recently increase of the waste agricultural film (WAF) raises the loss of the resources and produces the environmental damage in Korea. The Korean government has established the basic plan for increasing the recycling rate and abating the environmental damage. The objective of this paper is to estimate the economic benefits attached to the policy of recycling the WAF using contingent valuation method, aiming to provide policy-makers with useful information to make an informed public decision in recycling the WAF. The overall results show that the respondents well accepted the contingent market and would be willing to pay a significant amount for the proposed policy of recycling the WAF. The mean willingness to pay and the truncated mean willingness to pay per household were 4641 Korean won (US$ 3.6) and 5730 Korean won (US$ 4.4), respectively. Total economic benefits for the population amounted to approximately 14.33 billion Korean won (US$ 11.02 million) per year. This quantitative information can be used in cost-benefit analysis of the policy of recycling the WAF.
Notes
As the method for constructing the confidence intervals around 500–1000 sample sizes, the non-parametric bootstrapping method is superior to the Monte-Carlo simulation approach proposed by Krinsky and Robb (Citation1986), when the true underlying distribution is logistic (Cooper, Citation1994). The procedures of the non-parametric bootstrapping method are as follows: (1) Creating multiple simulated data sets, each formed by sampling N times with replacement from actual data; (2) Applying maximum likelihood to these simulated data and computing the welfare measures from a new set of coefficient estimates; (3) Repeating the above procedures with M replications enough to generate an empirical distribution for the welfare measures; and (4) Computing the confidence intervals using M welfare measures (Efron and Tibshirani, Citation1993).
For more recycling the WAF, Korea Resources Recovery and Reutilization Cooperation takes action by constructing the WAF treatment facilities with a capacity of 15 000 tons a year in several areas.
The source of public opposition has been characterized as NIMBY, or not in my backyard (Morell and Magorian, Citation1982; Portney, Citation1991).