# 4.2 Survey Statistics

The responses to the questions concerning current situation of solid waste collection and disposal service show that people think the solid waste is causing serious problems in this county. Over 85% of the respondents mentioned the solid waste problem in their neighborhood to be one of the most urgent environmental problems. 70% of the respondents mentioned the trash problem to be one of the most urgent social problems. 66% of the respondents believe the residential solid waste to be a serious problem in Eryuan, among which 38% believe the problem to be very serious.

The survey also shows that Eryuan solid waste collection and disposal service lags significantly behind. 53% of the respondents, including all respondents in the three towns to be covered by the project, report that there are no solid waste collection and disposal activities in their neighborhood and another 21%, which are supposed to be covered by the old system, reported only irregular collection and disposal activities. Over 20% of the respondents believe their trash is only simply dumped and 42% do not know how their solid waste is treated.

The obvious lack of solid waste treatment service has caused negative impact on people located around the current solid waste dump site. 88% of the respondents believe the solid waste treatment project to be necessary and 94% of the respondents expressed their willingness to cooperate with the new project.

As shown in Table 2, 218 responses can be used for WTP estimations. Two observations have to be deleted as the respondents gave the same uncertainty responses to all of the proposed bid prices<sup>14</sup> , and another observation has to be deleted from the analysis as it did not give a positive (―probably yes‖ or ―definitely yes‖) answer even at the price of zero<sup>15</sup> .

The statistics of the responses to the MBDC WTP question are summarized in Table 3. For each price listed in the questionnaire, the percentage of respondents who choose a specific likelihood answer are provided. In table 3, we can see that the percentage of ―definitely yes‖ answers is decreasing rapidly from 99.54% at the price of zero to 0.97% at the price of 60 yuan. While the percentage of ―definitely no‖ answers increases steadily with the price offered, from 0% at price of zero to about 99.54% when the price increases to 350 yuan. Between the prices of 5 and 30 yuan, 12 to 30% of the respondents chose the ―probably yes/no‖ or ―not sure‖ response options, showing the respondents actually have relatively important uncertainties in their preferences to the bid prices as proposed in the WTP question.

# **5. WTP Estimation**

# 5.1 Estimation Methodology

Wang and He (2010) developed a new methodology for estimating and analyzing the MBDC valuation data, which is summarized below and will be used in this study. Suppose an individual i’s WTP is Vi, which is a random variable with a cumulative distribution function

> 14 The answers given by these two respondents for follow-up question shows that, one does not think he should pay extra fee and the other believe his household can handle their own trash. In some sense, these two answers can be regarded as protest response. Therefore we remove them from our following statistical analyses.

> 15 From the response to the follow-up question, we find this household located close to the new landfill site. So his no-response can be considered as a protest.

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