Willingness to engage in a pro-environmental behavior: An analysis of e-waste recycling based on a national survey of U.S. households

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• 作者：Jean-Daniel M. Saphores^a ; ^b ; ^{saphores@uci.edu} ; Oladele A. Ogunseitan¹ ; ^c ; ^{Oladele.Ogunseitan@uci.edu} ; Andrew A. Shapiro² ; ^d ; ^{aashapir@uci.edu}
• 关键词：Recycling behavior ; Drop-off recycling ; Electronic waste ; Generalized ordered logit ; Factor analysis
• 刊名：Resources, Conservation and Recycling
• 出版年：2012
• 出版时间：March 2012
• 年：2012
• 卷：60
• 期：Complete
• 页码：49-63
• 全文大小：740 K

文摘

Using concepts from environmental psychology and economics, we investigate U.S. households?willingness to engage in a form of pro-environmental behavior: recycling electronic waste (e-waste) at drop-off locations. We rely on rich dataset from a 2006 national survey of U.S. households (N = 2136). Our internal variables include a modified version of the New Ecological Paradigm scale, a moral norm scale based on Schwartz's norm-activation model, and indicators of social pressure for recycling. External variables consist of detailed socio-demographic characteristics. Our logit model shows that external variables do not help characterizing people with e-waste recycling experience, except that they tend to have larger families or to be over 60 years old. However, knowing that e-waste contains potentially toxic materials, recycling conventional materials at work or at school, and especially having strong moral norms helps explain e-waste recycling behavior. Using a generalized ordered logit model, we then show that the most important variables for explaining household willingness to recycle e-waste are internal variables, followed by recycling convenience, knowledge of the potential toxicity of e-waste, prior e-waste recycling experience, as well as gender and marital status; education, age, and ethnicity play only a minor role, while knowledge of e-waste laws, availability of curbside recycling for domestic waste, and income are not statistically significant. Our results suggest that e-waste recycling can be stimulated by promoting moral norms, educating the public about the benefits of recycling e-waste, and making e-waste recycling more convenient but other measures will likely be necessary to tackle the e-waste problem.