Factors influencing illegal dumping of hazardous waste in China

In recent years, illegal dumping of hazardous waste (IDHW) in China has become a recurring problem. Effective identification and exploration of the factors influencing illegal dumping are crucial for incident prevention and hazardous waste management, but its analysis has rarely been reported. Thus, this study focused on 568 cases of IDHW officially reported by the government. Through regular expressions, the categories of dumped wastes and the provinces where the incidents occurred were extracted. Furthermore, a comprehensive set of influencing factors was constructed by text mining for the case content and by the integration from the existing literature. On this basis, the unstructured and structured data were integrated using a Boolean dataset to respectively explore the association rules of influencing factors for the overall IDHW and for major waste categories, in conjunction with the extracted province information. Subsequently, a Bayesian network was constructed by utilizing the results of association rules mining and the key factors were identified through corresponding analysis. The findings of this study reveal a close connection between various influencing factors, with distinct key factors identified for different categories of hazardous waste. Among them, law-enforcement emerges as a crucial factor in most IDHW cases, while the factor of public monitoring for metallic hazardous waste and the factor of government supervision for distillation residue waste and other waste play a key role in their respective cases of illegal dumping. These findings offer a fresh research perspective for investigating the factors influencing IDHW and present helpful insights for developing effective strategies to prevent and control such incidents.