An Analysis of the Factors behind Rural Residents’ Satisfaction with Residential Waste Management in Jiangxi, China

Abstract

With the increasing environmental and health problems caused by residential solid waste (RSW), upgrading waste disposal services has become a key priority in rural areas of developing countries. Waste disposal services can be improved by incorporating the end-user evaluation of the services and the infrastructure. This study aims to analyze the respondents’ satisfaction with waste disposal services and infrastructure in rural China, which has not been well documented in the previous literature. For this purpose, we applied the ordered probit model on survey data of 1064 rural residents of Jiangxi, China. In two separate models, two independent variables, i.e., users’ ranking of waste disposal management services and waste disposal management infrastructure, were regressed on five sets of policy, personal, social and demographic, environmental, and village characteristics of the respondents. Our results show that rural residents have relatively high satisfaction (level four out of five) with RSW services. We found a significant correlation between all five investigated characteristics (personal, social and demographic, environmental, and village characteristics) and respondents’ satisfaction with RSW management. However, the correlation differs in magnitude and direction among different respondent groups, where gender, minority status, the sanitary condition of household toilets, and treatment of toilet waste at the village level have the largest influence on satisfaction. It was found that male respondents, ethnic minorities, residents with non-farming status, and respondents with more sanitary household toilets have higher satisfaction levels. Our results provide crucial references for decision-makers to effectively promote the further optimization and improvement of rural waste disposal systems in the future.