Over the past 35 years, the Chinese government has established various policies to tackle problems related to the municipal handling of solid waste. It is necessary to study policy-making trends in the area of municipal solid waste for further sustainable development in China. This article fills this gap by designing a new analytical framework made up of policymaker indicators, policy practitioner indicators, policy beneficiaries' indicators, policy tool indicators, and policy support indicators in order to analyse the policy-making trend based on China's major municipal solid waste policies from 1 January 1980 to 1 March 2015. Results have shown that policy-making related to municipal solid waste has changed significantly in the past 35 years and that more municipal solid waste policies were issued by one or a few ministerial departments than by the State Council and National People's Congress. Moreover, the study has shown that the government and companies have dedicated more attention to taking action about municipal solid waste than individuals. With regard to the policy tools, policy-making has stressed the use of market-type tools, regulation-type tools, and public participation-type tools together to tackle the municipal solid waste problem since 2000. Finance and information support were used more as policy support by municipal solid waste policies than technology. This article provides some novel insights on the policy-making trend of municipal solid waste in China.
