Abstract
Economic growth and rapid urbanization have resulted in various urban issues related to sustainable development in emerging economies such as China. Nowadays, two-thirds of China’s cities are besieged by waste and one-fourth of the cities have no space to build landfills. China is embarking on a top-down waste sorting revolution, in which residents’ awareness and behaviour of participation are fundamental to the success of garbage classification. The purpose of this paper is to understand residents’ waste sorting behaviour and identify the influencing factors in China. The subjects of this study are urban and rural residents in Jiaxing, where local government has begun to encourage waste classification but has not yet legalized it. With the integration of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and value-belief-norm theory (NAM), this study represents a “motivation-intention-behaviour” theoretical model for the systemic illustration of the antecedents of household waste sorting behaviour. A total of 541 questionnaires were administered in person in households in Jiaxing, China. Structural equation modelling with partial least squares was applied to analyse empirically. The results show that attitudes (ATT), subjective norm (SN), and perceived behavioural control (PBC) have a significant positive effect on the intention of household waste sorting (WSI), and the perceived policy effectiveness (PPE) has a positive and significant effect on the attitudes and waste sorting intention. The waste sorting intention has a positive and significant effect on waste sorting behaviour (WSB). In addition, individual characteristics have a significant impact on waste sorting behaviour, where respondents of women, higher income, and middle and old age are more willing to implement waste sorting behaviours. This study theoretically contributes to the literature by improving the understanding of the determinants of household solid waste sorting behaviour. It also provides several recommendations to improve existing policies at the practitioner level. These recommendations can be valuable references for waste management in China and other emerging economies.
Highlights
IntroductionThe world generates at least 1.47 billion tons of municipal solid waste each year [1]
This study proposes a conceptual model of the behaviour mechanism of household waste sorting based on an integrated framework of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory
Through the above analysis of the results, we found that the more positive attitude of the individual residents, the stronger the control of self-behaviour and the clearer the intention of waste sorting behaviour, which is consistent with the research conclusions of
Summary
The world generates at least 1.47 billion tons of municipal solid waste each year [1]. China has become the world’s largest waste producer since 2004 as reported by the World. With the acceleration of the urbanization process and the gradual improvement of people’s living standards, the amount of domestic waste generated in Chinese cities has been increasing year by year. A report in 2019 revealed that China produces 10 billion tons of garbage every year, with an annual stock of 6 billion tons and 500 million square meters of farmland occupied [3]. The rate of garbage explosion has outstripped the garbage disposal capacity of urban areas in China. Statistics from the Ministry of Housing and
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