The impacts of social interaction-based factors on household waste-related behaviors

Abstract

With the economy growing rapidly, as well as the increasing diversification of human material and cultural needs, waste management poses a pressing challenge for local authorities in China. The primary aim of the present study is to examine the determinants of household waste-related behaviors, especially focusing on the roles of two important social interaction-based factors, social norms and networks, and their combinations. Specifically, this paper adopted the method of principal component analysis to capture social interactions and leveraged ordered logit models to explore their influences on the behaviors involving waste sorting, bringing their own shopping bags and reusing plastic bags in other aspects. Using the data from the Chinese General Social Survey in 2013 (CGSS2013), the results reveal that both social norms and social networks exert a significant positive influence on pure altruistic waste sorting while only social norms are positively associated with bringing their own shopping bags to store and reusing bags in other aspects with the nature of impure altruism. Meanwhile, there is no convincing evidence for the interaction effect between social norms and social networks on waste sorting, yet the interaction item does work together negatively influencing bringing their own bags and reusing bags behaviors. Moreover, the results show that social norms have a much larger effect on waste-related behaviors in males than females while social networks lead to significant promotion in waste sorting only for females. For people with higher education levels, the impacts of social norms and social networks on waste sorting and bringing their own bags behaviors are insignificant, while the higher income groups are weakly affected by social networks as well, partly because of time constraints and opportunity cost. Lastly, this paper provides new insight into waste management from the perspective of social interaction.

Keywords: Bringing their own bags; Reusing bags; Social networks; Social norms; Waste sorting.