Attitudinal, normative, and control beliefs underlying people’s curbside household waste recycling decisions

Katherine M White,Melissa K Hyde

doi:10.7790/ejap.v9i1.298

Abstract

This study examined the beliefs underlying people’s decision-making, from a theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework, in the prediction of curbside household waste recycling. Community members in Brisbane, Australia (N = 148) completed a questionnaire assessing the belief based TPB measures of attitudinal beliefs (costs and benefits), normative beliefs (important referents), and control beliefs (barriers) in relation to engaging in curbside household waste recycling for a 2-week period. Two weeks later, participants completed self report measures of recycling behaviour for the previous fortnight. The results revealed that the attitudinal, normative, and control beliefs for people who performed higher and lower levels of recycling differed significantly. A regression analysis identified both normative and control beliefs as the main determinants of recycling behaviour. For normative beliefs, high level recyclers perceived more approval from referents such as partners, friends, and neighbours to recycle all eligible materials. In addition, the strong results for control beliefs indicated that barriers such as forgetfulness, lack of time, and laziness were rated as more likely to hamper optimal recycling performance for low level recyclers. These findings provide important applied information about beliefs to target in the development of future community recycling campaigns.

Highlights

Despite high household recycling rates in Australia (only 1% of households had not recycled or reused household materials in the past year; Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2007), there is still a substantial proportion of households not recycling or reusing all eligible recyclable materials including aluminium (19%), steel cans (30%), glass (10%), plastic bottles (10%) and paper/cardboard/newspapers (9%) (ABS, 2006)
A median split (Mdn = 6.00) on the behaviour scale scores was used to create a group of high recyclers and low recyclers
The attitudinal, normative, and control beliefs differentiating between householders engaging in high and lower levels of recycling were examined (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Despite high household recycling rates in Australia (only 1% of households had not recycled or reused household materials in the past year; Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2007), there is still a substantial proportion of households not recycling or reusing all eligible recyclable materials including aluminium (19%), steel cans (30%), glass (10%), plastic bottles (10%) and paper/cardboard/newspapers (9%) (ABS, 2006). Examined factors in the international literature that relate to regular recycling include personal factors such as demographics and personality (e.g., Gamba & Oskamp, 1994; Simmons & Widmar, 1990) and situational factors including norms that reflect if performing recycling is common among certain groups/neighbourhoods (e.g., Hopper & Nielson, 1991; Vining & Ebreo, 1992) In addition to these predictors, positive (e.g., environmental reasons; Vining & Ebreo, 1990) and negative (e.g., mess, lack of storage space; Werner & Makela, 1998) beliefs and attitudes towards engaging in recycling have been found to significantly influence recycling (e.g., Oskamp, Harrington, Edwards, Sherwood, Okuda, & Swanson, 1991). There are examples for examining TPB beliefs for recycling (e.g., Boldero, 1995; Cheung, Chan, & Wong, 1999; Taylor & Todd, 1995), Boldero’s (1995) study is the only one to have undertaken an in-depth comparison of the beliefs to differentiate between recyclers and non-recyclers

Methods

Results

Conclusion