An Empirical Study Of The NIMBY Waste-to-energy Plant In China

With the fast development of domestic urbanization and the improvement of urbanand rural waste collection and transportation system, the waste yield and transportationamount are also highly increasing, which leads to huge pressure and crisis to citiessurrounded by waste. As the rapid construction of waste incineration plants, manyplaces are encountering NIMBY conflicts and nearby residents are against to wasteincineration. Thus, the waste treatment faces the unprecedented NIMBY trouble.Through studying the characteristics and influence factors of NIMBY effects inwaste-to-energy plants, this study proposed the influence factor model of NIMBY,which is composed of risk awareness, public trust, public participation and riskacceptance, as well as the sub factors of them. Reflecting on the typical NIMBY conflictcases about waste-to-energy plants in America, Japan, Beijing, Guangzhou andHangzhou, we summarized the same reasons about so called NIMBY conflicts. Firstly,there was no adequate communications with surrounding residents before early siteselection; secondly, the improvement of public environment awareness was neglectedby local government; thirdly, lack of dynamic balance between the economic andenvironmental benefits; lastly, the trust and supervisory mechanism were not built upthoroughly. Therefore, the core of NIMBY management was the benefit andpsychological demands of stakeholders, and the way to obtain the greatest commondivisor upon the general social benefit. On the basis of these factors, the problem ofNIMBY caused by waste-to-energy plants could be smoothly resolved by employingbalanced management.In terms of Everbright International’s waste-to-energy cases in Suzhou Wujiangand Changzhou, we adopted the questionnaire and on-site interview means, as well asthe combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, for the purpose of studying theeffective balanced management methods of NIMBY among a network of government,publics and investment operator, and then achieved a dynamic equilibrium in the aspectsof benefit, psychology and status of all parties. Hence, many efforts should be paid,such as the stronger government credibility, the enhancement of the strictestenvironmental protection standards, the selection of operator with demonstration effects,the improvement of waste tipping fees, the highly attention to land requisition and demolishing, strengthening the supervision of the third party, and the informationtransparency. The study also analyzed the balanced management processes of NIMBYeffects from the point view of investment operator.Furthermore, the paper compared and analyzed five cases of NIMBYconflicts and two cases about solutions from eight aspects, such as governmentcredibility, information transparency, location optimization, interests balance,response to public opinion, environmental protection standards, publicparticipation and supervision mechanism. In addition, we concluded thatconstruction and operation of waste-to-energy plants could be accepted byresidents only if a dynamic equilibrium was reached among government, publicsand investment operator.Aimed at solving the NIMBY trouble in the domestic waste-to-energy plants, weput forward six measures and advices, including location optimization withoutdisturbing residents, balanced management with a dynamic equilibrium amongstakeholders, improvement of government credibility through establishing a multi-levelregulation mechanism, information transparency to strengthen the effective publiccommunication, public participation and building the response mechanism for publicopinions, as well as improvement of environmental protection standards and to increasewaste tipping fees.