Research on factors influencing municipal household solid waste separate collection: Bayesian belief networks

Municipal household solid waste (MHSW) has become a serious problem in China over the course of the last two decades, resulting in significant side effects to the environment. Therefore, effective management of MHSW has attracted wide attention from both researchers and practitioners. Separate collection, the first and crucial step to solve the MHSW problem, however, has not been thoroughly studied to date. An empirical survey has been conducted among 387 households in Harbin, China in this study. We use Bayesian Belief Networks model to determine the influencing factors on separate collection. Four types of factors are identified, including political, economic, social cultural and technological based on the PEST (political, economic, social and technological) analytical method. In addition, we further analyze the influential power of different factors, based on the network structure and probability changes obtained by Netica software. Results indicate that technological dimension has the greatest impact on MHSW separate collection, followed by the political dimension and economic dimension; social cultural dimension impacts MHSW the least.