Estimating citizen's adaptive behavior for sustainable plastic waste management based on a choice experiment

Plastic waste is considered a global environmental problem, which causes a big challenge for authorities' managers to find proper solutions aimed to solve the question of plastic waste management (PWM). As PWM is an integrated social-ecological system, it is affected by changes in several social, environmental, and political factors, and by resources accessed by residents and communities. Based on adaptive capacity and community capitals framework, this study adopted a choice experiment to explore the preferences of a community in Vietnam for attributes of adaptive capacity for PWM and their willingness to participate (WTP) under multiple proposed PWM scenarios. The results show that communities are willing to support and engage in the attributes of adaptive capacity to improve the status quo of the PWM system. The "adopting a zero-waste lifestyle" attribute receive maximum attention from the respondents, followed by "empowering community organizations" and "using recycled or eco-friendly materials". Heterogeneity preferences between people groups are also confirmed for the adaptive capacity attribute of PWM. Further, the scenario of "adapting plastic waste management" generates the highest marginal WTP among the PWM scenarios. These findings could be utilized to develop specific policies, management strategies, and adaptation measures for plastic waste reduction in the future that can encourage communities and urban areas that are more adaptive to the PWM.