A Conceptual Framework for Understanding and Analysing Attitudes towards Household-Waste Management

Abstract

The problem of household waste poses an international dilemma. The blueprint for worldwide sustainable development agreed by national leaders in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Agenda 21 (UNCED, 1992), highlighted waste from domestic sources as a major barrier to achieving environmental sustainability in the 21st century. The householdwaste problem is global in its dimension, but has recently leapt onto the political agenda in developed nations as the stark reality emerges that there are fewer and fewer sites suitable for sending waste to be buried as landfill. This is also accentuated by the upsurge of NIMBYism (not in my back yard syndrome) among the vocal middle classes of the wealthy nations who protest at landfill sites being placed near their homes (Furuseth, 1992;Murdoch and Marsden, 1994). Overconsumption and the ethos of a`throw-away' society have combined with middle-class aspirations for a privatised notion of environmental quality, leading to a problematic situation in which everincreasing amounts of waste are being produced, but with fewer acceptable places, both physically and psychologically, for it to be dumped.The delayed publication of the UK government's Waste Strategy in June 2000 demonstrated the severe municipal waste problem now facing England and Wales. In the year 1998/99, 28 million tonnes of muncipal waste were produced, with 25.1 million tonnes of this coming from households. This represents 25 kg of waste from each household per week. The strategy also indicated that in the same period, 82% of this waste was sent to landfill, with only 9.5% being recycled and just 8% being incinerated with some energy recovery (DETR, 2000).The strategy outlined a number of measures that will tackle the rising waste mountain. Statutory requirements on local authorities to increase recycling were set, according to each authority's current recycling level. Tradable permits for landfill were outlined whereby authorities with less waste being sent to landfill could sell`landfill space' to authorities with poorer disposal records, thus resulting in a net decrease in landfill. Increases in the Landfill Tax, initiated by the previous UK government in 1996, were also emphasised. Under this scheme the cost of sending waste to landfill will rise progressively until a review in 2004.

Waste prevention and social preferences: the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations

“…There is a significant current in the literature 6 that has analyzed agents' environmental behavior in the context of the mixed public good, where the benefit deriving from the private component of the good leads to individual equilibrium choices that support environmental targets: these 'choices' often go beyond legal and contractual obligations. In addition, great interest has been devoted to including individual environmental behavior within psychological literature (Barr et al, 2001;De Young, 1996). In these works, the non-pecuniary levers of environmental behavior are attributed to different norms of behavior as altruism, social or moral norms, warm-glow and eco-centrism.…”

Recycling Behaviour Among Householders: Synthesizing Determinants Via a Meta-analysis

“…The studies which have included this variable unambiguously show a significant correlation between recycling behaviour and dwelling type, as represented in Fig. 5 [4,9,21,22,26,33,36]. Most of the findings on this issue make it possible to state that private housing (single-family dwelling) positively influences recycling behaviour.…”

“…4). Some authors have found a relationship between recycling behaviour and age [10,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], but others report no significant correlation [4,7,[30][31][32][33].…”

“…Some researchers combine the socio-demographic and technical-organisational variables in one situational group [4]. The framework presented may be modified in the light of the discussion below and the empirical findings and analyses presented later in the paper.…”

“…Each discipline looks at the specific variables within its subject area, for example economists often look at monetary rewards such as volume-based pricing [1,2] or weightbased pricing [3], whereas environmental psychologists often look at environmental concerns as the motivation for recycling [4]. Sociologists study social pressure, as the effect of external incentives [5]; legal researchers look at the effects of legal mechanisms such as mandatory recycling [6]; and engineers mostly investigate technologies and organisational schemes of recycling.…”