From NIMBY to BIMBY: An evaluation of aesthetic appearance and social sustainability of MSW incineration plants in China

Abstract The Not-In-My-BackYard (NIMBY) claims caused by the rapid expansion of waste incineration in China make stakeholders pay more attention to the environmental and social impact. Nowadays, the environmental impact is under control of the whole society while the social sustainability is often neglected. As the social sustainability is vital to the public acceptance and conducive to convert NIMBY claims to Beauty-In-My-BackYard (BIMBY) synergy, all stakeholders desire to know the gap but lack evaluation method. This paper proposes a quantitative evaluation system for the aesthetic appearance of MSW incineration plants for the first time. It uses aesthetic appearance to measure the social sustainability of MSW incineration plants. Real-world photos of 177 incineration plants in China were collected to support the evaluation using weighted sum method. The weights of factors contributing to the aesthetic appearance were obtained by AHP. The process of pairwise comparison in AHP was conducted by an online questionnaire survey involving more than 100 interviewees in various professions. It is evaluated that the aesthetic appearance is not correlated with the pollution control ability. The spatial distribution of different levels of aesthetic appearance shows that eastern provinces should pay more attention to the improvement of old incineration plants. As case studies, the designs of four typical plants are analyzed. The analysis results reveal the gap between NIMBY plants and BIBMY plants. More importantly, they can contribute to push forward the improvements of aesthetic appearance, social sustainability, and public acceptance for MSW incineration plants in China.