Factors influencing willingness to pay for a municipal waste collection fee in Songkhla, Thailand

Abstract

The municipal solid waste management has been a radical problem especially in Songkhla, Thailand. The municipality has attempted to reduce by putting a huge effort on waste collection and disposal over the last few years. Even though the amount of waste was decreased, it did not reflect a sustainable waste management due to an unchanging behavior of waste generation of Songkhla residents. To solve this, the study aimed to find factors influencing Songkhla residents to pay for a municipal waste collection fee in order to implement the policy in the future. 400 questionnaires were obtained from households located in the Songkhla municipal area. The data were analyzed with a binomial logistic regression technic because of the ability of analyzing binary variable. The findings indicated that the residents who got married and live in a detached or semi-detached house with young adult members would accept to pay some amount of fee. Meanwhile, the residents who live in a city center where they are running a store or live in townhouse close to major places like a hospital, a police station, an education institution, and a superstore did not want to pay for the fee due to high opportunity of increasing waste disposal cost. As a result, to implement the policy in Songkhla, the policymakers should divide their plan into two stages. Firstly, the policy should be imposed in an outside area where people live in a detached or semi-detached house and has to be delivered with a good quality. Secondly, the policy could then be implemented in the city center which most residents live in store buildings and townhouses. In this way, any opposition from the residents could be minimized as they have seen a good quality of the service in the first stage before. Thus, a sustainable municipal waste management could occur in Songkhla, Thailand.