EXTERNAL INFLUENCES ON RESIDENTS � WASTE CLASSIFICATION BEHAVIOUR: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY IN CHINA

Abstract

Due to the increasing amount of waste produced throughout the years in the world, therefore countries have the urgency to implement effective household waste measures to solve this problem. For the internal factors affecting recycling behaviour, there are already many comprehensive literatures that have been done. In addition, the effects on recycling behaviour by internal factors are small in scale. Therefore, we have to investigate on the external factors that will affect on the recycling participation rate so that we can have a more complete picture of the different aspects affecting waste classification behaviour In this paper, we examined the possible external factors such as informal recycling market, perceived effectiveness of polices influencing waste classification behaviour of Hangzhou’s residents. The street surveys were disseminated to the households through systematic sampling in JB Street of Hangzhou. A 96.2% response rate was achieved through the 1515 questionnaires were collected out of the 1575 that were disseminated in the JB street of Hangzhou After the whole collection process of questionnaires were done, we did a data cleaning process. The invalid questionnaires were sieved out such as those with blank responses, missing important information such as age or gender and the consistent selecting of the same answer will be excluded from our study. Thus, a sample size of 863 which are the remaining samples after our data cleaning process In this paper, we will adopt the PLS modelling method because it can be applied to various types of data and to prove theories and to develop new theories. The PLS-SEM analysis revealed a significant and positive relationship between all the constructs to recycling intention except the path from market incentive to recycling intention. We further discussed on how each of the demographic variables will have a moderating effect on recycling intention. Lastly, we summed up the findings and identified the limitations of this study as well. Through these results we can increase our understanding on perceived effectiveness of external factors influencing recycling behaviour. This study can then be extrapolate to other countries and help other government to implement effective household waste management policies.