Unmasking Malaysian preferences for effective plastic waste management: a choice experiment approach

This study conducted a choice experiment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to investigate public preferences for plastic waste management strategies. The study aimed to identify community favored strategies, uncover distinct community segments with varying preferences for effective strategies, and develop plausible future scenarios for decision-making. Findings revealed that waste segregation is not widely practiced, and respondents concerned about plastic waste in the environment. Specific favored waste reduction strategies were identified using random parameter logit model. Two distinct segments emerged from the latent class model, each with unique preferences for plastic waste management strategies. Respondents of Chinese ethnicity exhibit greater willingness to participate in specific strategies than their non-Chinese counterparts. Based on these findings, policy implications include targeting Chinese residential associations for pilot projects using their favored strategies, implementing single-use plastics bans in non-Chinese residential associations, incentivizing gated residential associations to promote waste reduction, collaborating with waste collection and plastic recycling companies to introduce segregation methods and incentives in residential associations, improving recycling infrastructure in public places, providing multilingual waste segregation guidelines for households, enhancing waste collector understanding through capacity building, and developing a comprehensive plastic waste management action plan for Kuala Lumpur, potentially extendable to other Malaysian cities.