Household willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a better waste management system An empirical investigation in the. Mawanella Pradeshiya Sabha region

Abstract

The Mawanella Pradeshiya Sabha in the Kegalle district that serves to a population of 100,280 hasintroduced a novel approach to manage its waste under its "Increased Public Awareness & LocalGovernment Capacity Building Program" in 2004. The key feature of this program was, educatingand encouraging households to collect and sort waste at its source, which was facilitated by distributionof plastic bags and waste bins with different colour codes designed for the purpose, and subsequently,treat the waste at specific dumping sites using the principles of recycling to produce marketableproducts. This study assesses the progress of this program, and in particular how much the householdsare WTP for continuation and advancement of the program, because the regulatory authorities insistthat it cannot run the program with taxpayers money for any longer time. A survey was conductedwith a help of a structured questionnaire with 120 households selected randomly to represent 31 %households joined to the pilot program in 2004. The WTP of each household was modeled with anumber of variables, includ ing age, income and education level, amount of waste production, distanceto waste collection centre etc. The Contingent Valuation techniques were employed to estimate thecoefficients of model. The results suggest that all variables, except the level of education. have apositive and significant impact on households' WTP for a better system. it was estimated that ahousehold, in general, would like to pay Rs. 39.05 per month to continue the program. The officialsfrom the Pradheshiya Sabha indicated that this is a rational estimate as it can cover the net operatingcost of about Rs. 25-30 per month per household, and the rest can be used to improve the system.