Residents' attitudes and willingness to pay for solid waste management in Macau

Increasing public attention has been brought to bear on the solid waste management in Macau, due to the continually increasing generation amount and the limited space. In this study, we discussed residents' attitudes and willingness to pay for solid waste recycling through a questionnaire survey. The results showed that Macau residents owned the relatively good environmental awareness. In regard to Macau environmental quality, most respondents (92.4%) expressed their satisfactions on current situation. About 50.2% respondents thought that the solid waste pollution in Macau was more serious than other three environmental pollutions. The survey data revealed a positive attitude towards source separation in Macau. Most of respondents (95.7%) were willing to sort the solid waste at home, if the government required them to do it. In addition, for the question how to improve the solid waste recycling in Macau, "enhancing residents' environmental awareness" was considered as the most effective methods, accounting for about 38.5% respondents. In our study, most respondents (85.4%) also provided positive answers to the questions about WTP. Using the logistic regression method, these survey results support the hypothesis that the probability of the respondents' saying 'yes' to the WTP question increases with education level. The monthly mean WTP was 38.5 MOP per household and the annual WTP was approximately 79.7 million MOP for all of Macau. The results can be useful for understanding the residents' attitudes and WTP for solid waste disposal, for the policymakers and managers, and can be used to promote the recycling of solid waste in Macau. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.