Service preferences and willingness to pay for household waste management to achieve sustainability: A choice experiment from rural China.

This study employs a choice experiment (CE) to identify waste management charge (WMC) schemes that most effectively improve household waste management (HWM) in rural China by encouraging household payment and participation, and to assess their impacts on willingness to pay (WTP), government surplus, and total social welfare. The findings reveal strong latent demand for improved HWM, particularly in villages with poor infrastructure, with intrinsic motivation driving participation more than awareness of payment mechanisms. Aligning services with residents' preferences substantially increases WTP, securing adequate funding and enhancing total social welfare by ¥5.04 billion ($0.70 billion), including ¥4.57 billion ($0.64 billion) in payment surplus and ¥0.47 billion ($0.065 billion) in government surplus. Targeted subsidies, such as a 30 % fee reduction for low-income households, further strengthen system capacity without reducing aggregate welfare, generating an additional ¥3.76 billion ($0.52 billion) in HWM funding and ¥4.23 billion ($0.59 billion) in government surplus. These results provide empirical evidence for designing equitable and financially sustainable WMC policies tailored to rural China.