What drive students to behave more environmentally friendly towards waste?

Abstract

Students’ behavior towards waste takes a crucial role to successful sustainable waste management at school level. As many scholars mentioned, a proper waste management should not only environmentally effective and economically efficient, but also socially acceptable. Therefore, it is important to know how to drive students to behave more environmental friendly. Using eco-friendly behavior survey for students as part of community engagement program titled “Creating Healthy, Fit and Productive Generation through Comprehensive Mental Revolution Model”, this paper aims to identify factors that determine students’ eco-friendly behavior. This survey was administered to 797 students from three high schools in the city of Bekasi, SMA N 1 Bekasi, SMA N 2 Bekasi and SMK Korpri. We divided three broad characteristics in determining student’s eco-friendly behavior, namely individual characteristics, household characteristics and community characteristics, as mentioned in various researches. The result shows that out of three broad characteristics, individual characteristics play significant role in determining the level of student’s eco-friendly behavior. In terms of individual characteristics, knowledge about waste and school course plays positive and significant role in determining the level. For the study course, we conclude that students in the science course have a relatively higher eco-friendly behavior level compared to social course or others. Female students are also more likely to have higher level of eco-friendly behavior rather than male students. Finally, daily expenditure significantly determines the level. On the other hand, we found that environmental concern and class rank do not have significant effect to student’s behavior. In addition, none of the household and community characteristics variables were significant in determining the behavior. This result emphasizes the importance of individual characteristics improvement, especially waste knowledge and environmental education, to drive students in dealing waste appropriately.