Exploring the Pathways to Participation in Household Waste Sorting in Different National Contexts: A Fuzzy-Set QCA Approach

Mingshi Wan,Liangjie Wan

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3027978

Mingshi Wan, Liangjie Wan

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.3027978

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Abstract

With the increasing pace of industrialization and economic growth, the continuous increase in household waste has become a great concern all over the world. Residents’ participation in household waste sorting is an effective way to promote the recycling of household waste. How to effectively promote more residents to participate in waste sorting has become an important issue of the government. Previous research mainly used two methods in exploring residents’ intention to sort waste: qualitative case studies to explore potential causal descriptions and statistic studies with the structural equation modeling. These researches, however, consider one special case or the net effect of a single factor, which fails to present the comparisons across international contexts and hardly clarifies the complex pathways to residents’ participation. In this research, a novel method fsQCA (fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis) is applied to explore the pathways both from a macro-level perspective and in different national contexts. Results suggest four different pathways influence residents’ participation in waste sorting. In the four pathways, GDP level and source separation system are key causal conditions to influence residents to sort waste, but different configurations of these conditions influence whether residents participate in waste sorting at a high rate. Only when the external conditions and the socio-demographic conditions are combined in a specific form, residents participate in waste sorting at a high rate. At last, the findings provide some exercisable suggestions for decision makers in developing countries to design promotion programs and waste sorting policies.

Highlights

With the rapid increase in population, fast economic growth and increasing industrialization and urbanization all over the world, the amount of municipal solid waste is surging in many countries
The proposition 1 is made as follows: 1.Only if the external conditions and socio-demographic conditions emerge simultaneously, residents participate in waste sorting at a high rate
Firstly, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze converted date and get edited truth table by setting consistency to be more than 0.8 and the minimum number of the coverage to be more than one case

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid increase in population, fast economic growth and increasing industrialization and urbanization all over the world, the amount of municipal solid waste is surging in many countries. The EU produced nearly 250 million tonnes of municipal solid waste per year, 486 kg per capita [1]. These increase in the amount of generated waste. How to properly manage solid waste has become an imminent issue for every country. Recycling of previously used materials has been thought as the best method for disposing of solid wastes [2], [3]. Huge amount of solid waste has not yet been classified, which would hinder waste recycling and produce environmental pollution [4]. Solid waste was landfilled without strict classification or incinerated directly, which threatens the soil and groundwater and pollutes the air.

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