Determinants of University Students' Waste Mobile Phones Recycling Intention

Abstract

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, mobile phones has become the utmost preference device for most Malaysian to stay connected. Over the past decades, mobile phone users in this country has been increasing steadily. Percentage of individuals in Malaysia using mobile phones increased from 94.2% in 2013 to 97.5% in 2015 (DOS, 2016). According to the hand phone users survey carried out by MCMC (2017) , there were 42.3 million mobile phone subscriptions with a penetration rate of 131.2% to a population of 32.3 million at the end of 2017. In a study on university students of Malaysia, Ho et al. (2018) revealed that a substantial amount of them (18.83%) actually do not know what to do with the waste mobile phones. This reflects the low awareness amongst university students and the lack of formal management system in Malaysia. Moreover, the findings show the rate of replacements of even functioning phones is high and a significant high stockpile of the waste mobile phones, which in turn increase the generation of e-waste eventually. Tremendous amount of waste mobile phones are expected to be generated in Malaysia. Malaysia is now facing a challenge on how to deal with the ever growing generation of waste mobile phones from users. An insight into their e-waste management practices and key predictors in relation to waste mobile phones recycling intention are therefore essential. This would help to lay the foundation for developing a suitable, workable, effective and efficient system of collecting e-wastes. This study aims to probe into university students' behavioural intentions to recycle waste mobile phones. In the meanwhile, it is expected to derive the policy implications for the future expansion and enhancement of mobile phones recycling response rate. Keywords: Determinants, Mobile Phones, Recycling, Intention, University Students