The recycling of solid wastes: Personal values, value orientations, and attitudes about recycling as antecedents of recycling behavior (original) (raw)
Related papers
Why recycle? A comparison of recycling motivations in four communities
Environmental Management, 1992
Four Iltinois communities with different sociodemographic compositions and at various stages of planning for solid waste management were surveyed to determine the influence of sociodemographic variables and planning stages on the factors that motivate recycling behavior. A factor analysis of importance ratings of reasons for recycling and for not recycling yielded five factors interpreted as altruism, personal inconvenience, social influences, economic incentives, and household storage. The four communities were shown to be significantly different in multivariate analyses of the five motivational factors. However, attempts to explain these community differences with regression analyses, which predicted the motivational factors with dummy codes for planning stages, a measure of self-reported recycling behavior, and sociodemographic measures were unsatisfactory. Contrary to expectation, the solid waste management planning stages of the cities (curbside pickup, recycling dropoff center, and planning in progress) contributed only very slightly to the prediction of motivational factors for recycling. Community differences were better explained by different underlying motivational structures among the four communities. Altruistic reasons for recycling (e.g., conserving resources) composed the only factor which was similar across the four communities. This factor was also perceived to be the most important reason for recycling by respondents from all four communities. The results of the study supported the notion that convenient, voluntary recycling programs that rely on environmental concern and conscience for motivation are useful approaches to reducing waste.
Predictors of Recycling Behavior: An Application of a Modified Health Belief Model1
Journal of Applied Social …, 1997
In an examination of environmentally related behavior, the health belief model (HBM) was applied to the recycling behavior of a random sample of Missouri residents. The results indicated that both the basic and modified versions of the HBM significantly predict recycling behavior; significant predictors include perceived barriers, perceived likelihood of negative outcomes due to failure to recycle, self-efficacy, and consideration of future consequences. These findings are consistent with applications of the HBM to health-related actions. The poor performance of several variables provides evidence of the psychological processes underlying decisions to recycle. 'We wish to thank Bruce Biddle and the Center for Research in Social Behavior for providing financial support for this study, and Scott Greathouse and Mark Wood for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We also acknowledge Esther Thorson, Kenneth Fleming, and the staff at the Center for Advanced Social Research for their assistance in collecting the data.
This paper presents a research study, which aimed to understand better Recycling Behavior by utilizing selected demographic and psychographic characteristics. The results indicated that middle-aged, higher educated employees are more engaged in recycling activities in Greece. It was also found that although the attitudes – behavior link remains an indisputable reality, the investigation of appropriate psychographic characteristics, such as personal values, can provide better understanding and predicting of the consumers’ recycling behavior. It was revealed that the consumers’ level of materialism is a stronger predictive factor than the consumers’ level of collectivism, while the consumers’ level of individualism did not provide evidence of direct relationship with their recycling behavior.
MOTIVATIONS AND BEHAVIORS THAT SUPPORT RECYCLING
This paper proposes that recycling researchers should pay attention to both attitudes towards recycling and Ž . the processes involved in recycling recyclers' phenomenal experiences and organizing strategies . As predicted by Sansone and colleagues' model of how people induce themselves to engage in necessary but boring Ž tasks, people who had reasons to persist at recycling that is, who held strong prorecycling attitudes or had a . social orientation towards recycling were more likely to redefine recycling so as to emphasize its pleasures or the sense of satisfaction they gained from contributing to the environment. These people were also more likely to have developed a way of organizing recycling in their homes, to report few interferences with recycling, andᎏmost importantᎏto recycle on both short-and long-term bases. In accord with the model, people who became better recyclers by Time 2 had had stronger prorecycling attitudes at Time 1 than people who remained poor recyclers. Our results are consistent with the view that people who make a valued but uninteresting task more phenomenally interesting and more manageable are more likely to continue at the task. Sansone and colleagues' model provides a useful way to look at recycling and also suggests a new way that attitudes may be linked to behaviorᎏvia cognitive transformation of behavior.
Reducing Solid Waste: Linking Recycling to Environmentally Responsible Consumerism
Environment and Behavior, 1999
A survey of several communities was conducted to investigate the public's response to solid waste issues. This study examines the relation between respondents' beliefs about environmentally responsible consumerism and environmental attitudes, motives, and self-reported recycling behavior. The study addressed (a) the public's perception of environment-related product attributes; (b) a sociodemographic characterization of environmentally concerned consumers; and (c) the depiction of the relations between attitudes, motives, recycling behavior, and environmental consumerism. The results indicated that respondents were most concerned about product toxicity and least concerned about product packaging. The data showed that only age and gender were predictive of respondents' ratings. Several 107 AUTHORS' NOTE: The items analyzed in this research were included in a larger questionnaire developed to assess residents'opinions of solid-waste-related issues in Champaign County, Illinois. Funding for the survey was provided by the Illinois Office of Solid Waste Research, a state agency that funds solid-waste research with a percentage of the tipping fees from state landfills. Completion of this article was supported in part by Downloaded from For some time, recycling has been proposed as a major behavioral, lowtechnology solution to the nation's solid waste problems. Recently, however, limitations in this approach have emerged. Once recycling becomes popularized among the public and the behavior is widespread, the level of recyclable materials diverted from the waste stream reaches a plateau. This happens partly because some materials remain nonrecyclable until the appropriate technology to process these materials is developed. Another impediment to recycling as a primary solution to solid waste management is market saturation; as the supply of materials dramatically increases with the promotion of recycling, new buyers of the materials must be found as existing markets are exhausted. Moreover, as public opposition to solutions such as incineration and landfilling increases, attention to behavioral solutions, particularly those that involve the encouragement of source reduction, becomes important. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has named source reduction and recycling its top two priorities for waste management, and there is an increasing need to understand the relation between the two. This article discusses issues surrounding waste reduction through environmentally responsible consumer behavior. In this research, we define environmentally responsible consumer behavior as the purchase of products that benefit or cause less harm to the environment than do more conventional consumer goods.
Consumer motivation to recycle when recycling is mandatory: Two exploratory studies
2003
ABSTRACT Household recycling is conceptualized as a social dilemma in which households have a choice between cooperative and defective options. Promoting cooperative choice in the recycling dilemma has emerged as an important issue for social marketing in recent years. Most of the available insights that could guide policy makers in designing appropriate social marketing strategies are based on research conducted in the context of voluntary recycling programs.
Environmental Concern and Recycling Behaviour
Procedia Economics and Finance, 2016
This study was carried out to determine recycling behaviour among 143 householders in Selangor. Data were analysed using the Structural Equation Modelling technique. Analysis shows that environmental concern is important towards attitude, and attitude helps to enhance the environmental concern to improve recycling behaviour. This study may help the understanding among householders of their attitude towards recycling. The findings will help the authority to address the issue.
International Journal of Environment and Waste Management, 2021
Limited success has been reported thus far on the effectiveness of government interventions such tax in promoting the use of green shopping bags in South Africa's grocery retail sector. There is a growing realisation that individuals are more likely to practice green consumerism if it is entrenched as part of their value system. This study represents an initial effort in an emerging market to understand the influence of value orientations in promoting the use of green shopping bags. This study employs the value-belief-norm theory to examine whether personal values influence the use of green shopping bags in South Africa. The research setting was South Africa's Gauteng province. Self-reported data was collected from a convenient sample of 487 consumers using a questionnaire survey. Structural equation modelling results identified biospheric value as Key words: single-use plastic shopping bags; green shopping bags; green consumerism; valuebelief-norm theory; South Africa. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Muposhi, A., Mpinganjira, M. and Wait, M.
1999
Household recycling is conceptualized as a social dilemma in which households have a choice between cooperative and defective options. Promoting cooperative choice in the recycling dilemma has emerged as an important issue for social marketing in recent years. Most of the available insights that could guide policy makers in designing appropriate social marketing strategies are based on research conducted in the context of voluntary recycling programs.