Quantifying the effect of socio-economic-geo drivers on the change of municipal waste disposal in China by an integrated TWFE-PRF-SDM methodology.

Municipal solid waste management and disposal in China have significantly evolved since 2000. Due to China's vast land area and significant socioeconomic and geographic disparities, nationwide waste management strategies need to be further evaluated. This study quantified the effect of social, economic, and geographic drivers on municipal waste disposal activities in 31 provincial-level administrative regions from 2003 to 2020, by establishing a methodology integrated by two-way fixed effects regression model, panel random forest, and spatial Durbin model. The results showed, in the past two decades, socio-economic-geo indicators significantly co-decided the landfill and incineration activities. In particular, the explanatory ability of GDP per capita was above 45%, while land resources and city size also showed great significance. Spatial autocorrelation analysis showed that the relationship between landfill/incineration rates and socio-economic-geo drivers changed notably from unobvious to significant with economic growth. Furthermore, the local economy and land resources displayed more impact than those of the neighboring regions, while sci-tech and education showed clear spatial spillover effects. Chinese government would carefully assess the full-scale promotion policy of incineration plants, landfill is still hold as a reasonable option for regions with specific socio-economic-geo conditions.

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.