Factors influencing waste separation intention of residential households in a developing country: Evidence from Hanoi, Vietnam

•Respondents in Hanoi hold positive attitudes towards waste separation at home.•72% of the sample are willing to pay a cash fine as a commitment for waste separation at home.•Trust, personal moral norms, perceived difficulties are important factors.•Communication campaigns to consolidate the trust and inspire moral obligations are essential.•Infrastructure needs to be upgraded to facilitate waste separation at home.

Although various programs of waste separation at source have been deployed over the last decades in developing countries, they have stopped at the level of pilot-programs and have generally not been replicable. This empirical study aims to investigate the factors influencing the intentions in separating waste of residential households in Vietnam's capital city, Hanoi. The waste separation intentions of respondents were judged by the amount of the cash fine that each household was willing to pay as a commitment to participation. An econometric analysis was employed to demonstrate that trust, personal moral norms, perceived difficulties and reciprocity are important factors explaining the residents' behavioral intentions in waste separation. These findings suggest that apart from the improvement of institutional capacity and guarantee of satisfactory facilities and vehicles, communication campaigns to consolidate trust and inspire moral obligations of residents also have an essential role to play in overcoming the common dilemmas of solid waste management in a typical city of a developing country such as Hanoi, Vietnam.