Solid waste has surged in rural China, home to more than 540 million people. To preserve the environment, the Chinese government has piloted garbage classification programs. However, little is known about whether and to what extent classifying garbage affects people's subjective well-being—should its effects be positive, people would be more amenable to classifying garbage, making it easier to entrench garbage classification practices and programs and ultimately improve the environment. Accordingly, we analyze the impact of garbage classification on subjective well-being using the 2020 China Land Economic Survey data. An endogenous treatment regression model is utilized to address self-selection into garbage classification programs. We find that this simple and somewhat mundane practice can significantly improve people's happiness and life satisfaction. These results reaffirm the compound benefits of allocating more public resources to accelerate the adoption of garbage classification in rural areas.

Increasingly, rural households in developing countries are shopping for food online, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. In parallel, dietary guidelines worldwide recommend eating a balanced and healthy diet. With this in mind, this study explores whether online food shopping boosts dietary diversity—defined as the number of distinct food groups consumed—among rural households in China. Because people choose to shop for food online, it is important to account for the self-selection bias inherent in online food shopping. Accordingly, we estimate the treatment effects of online food shopping on dietary diversity using the endogenous switching model with a count outcome variable. The results indicate that online food shopping increases dietary diversity by 7.34%. We also find that education, asset ownership, and knowing the government’s dietary guidelines are the main factors driving rural households’ decisions to shop for food online.