In accordance with the 1996 London Protocol, the marine dumping of wastewater generated from food was totally banned from 2013. Therefore, establishing a food wastewater bio-gasification facility for stable and continuous food wastewater treatment is necessary. The biogas produced from the wastewater can be used as fuel for electricity generation or for heating in power plants and can be sold as gas in cities as well as fuel for vehicles after undergoing a refining process. Thus, the South Korean government is trying to expand the bio-gasification facility of wastewater generated from food. In this study, we try to obtain information about the public value of such an expansion. For this purpose, the household willingness to pay (WTP) for the expansion is determined by applying the contingent valuation (CV) approach. A total of 1,000 South Korean households were involved in the CV survey, which had questions with dichotomous choices. The mean yearly public value WTP for expansion is estimated at 2,564 KRW per household. If this WTP is extrapolated from the sample to the nation’s population, the expansion in the national value is worth 50.1 billion KRW per year. These results indicate that the expansion of food wastewater bio-gasification facility is supported by Korean households.

As economic growth and development of the living standard causes increasing production of organic waste, the desire to take advantage of organic waste to produce energy is also increasing. Organic waste-to-energy can contribute to improving energy independence through domestic energy security as well as improving the environment by reducing the need for landfills. This paper attempts to quantitatively analyze the non-market benefits arising from the organic waste-to-energy policy. To this end, we apply a contingent valuation (CV) that is most widely used to measure the nonmarket benefits. As for the willingness to pay (WTP) elicitation method, we employed the one-and-one-half-bounded dichotomous choice (DC) model, which produces higher statistical efficiency than the single-bounded DC model and yields greater consistency than the double-bounded DC model. In the CV survey result of 1000 Korean households, a total of 586 households (58.6%) revealed zero WTP. This implies that the use of the mixture model to deal with zero WTP responses was a suitable approach in our study. The yearly mean WTP was computed as KRW 3598 for the next ten years per household, which is statistically significant at the 1% level. Expanding the value to the national population gives us KRW 67.3 billion per year and this value demonstrates the non-market benefits of the organic waste-to-energy policy. This quantitative information could be utilized as a significant reference in the implementation of the organic waste-to-energy policy.