RESEARCH ON INFLUENCE FACTORS OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE INCINERATION: SCENARIO ANALYSIS USING BAYESIAN BELIEF NETWORKS

The issue of municipal solid waste (MSW) in the environment has caused an increasing concern in recent years, and various strategies have been proposed to tackle this problem. Incineration is commonly viewed as an efficient way to tackle this growing challenge of MSW management. However, incineration involves wide participation from all aspects of the society. Thus, it is crucial to understand the factors from different players of the society that influence the MSW incineration performance. This study investigates key influence factors from four dimensions: governments, enterprises, residents, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This is a systematic study on factors influencing MSW incineration in the frigid region, where the subject area chosen for this investigation is the city of Harbin in northeast China due to its distinctive climate and extreme cold winter. The empirical analysis is based on a comprehensive survey conducted among 337 households in the selected areas. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of influence factors under different scenarios based on Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) and Scenario Analysis. The results show that the enterprises dimension has the greatest impact due to its great demand for appropriate equipment and technology to handle easily-frozen MSW incineration in winter. Governments and NGOs, these two dimensions have more of indirect bearing on the MSW incineration by influencing enterprises behaviors through intermediate factors including policy guidance and proper supervision. While the residents dimension appears to have a relatively smaller impact on the total MSW incineration performance, their voluntary recycling efforts have contributed to adequate incineration largely preventing uninflammable MSWs from being thrown into the incinerators.