The Study On Residential Behavior For Source Separation Of Household Waste

With the rapid urbanization in China, household waste in cities has become one of the most important problems needed to be resolved from the city development point of view. Source separation can not only reduce disposal cost, but also improve the rate of transforming waste into resources. So it is the premise for realizing the goal of reducing and recycling household waste. Although source separation is considered a critical process in household waste management, it is very difficult to implement it and bring satisfactory performance.Factors, such as environmental consciousness and environmental attitude, are the very important in regulating, inducing and controlling people's behavior. Residents could have environmental behavior when they realize the interrelationship between environment and human beings, and the individual environmental behavior's serious impact on the whole environment. Hence it is meaningful to study how to control, induce and cultivate resident's behavior of managing household waste, which can help environment policy makers to establish related strategies and rules.With the Chinese residents in cities as research targets, this dissertation analyzes and identifies factors impacting resident's behavior of separating their waste at source. The influencing path and strength of those factors on the behavior are also studied, and a theoretical framework about resident's behavior of source separation is developed. Based on these analyses and findings, some suggestions are provided for municipal governments to understand the status quo and influencing factors of resident's behavior of source separation in China, to make relevant policies and rules, and also to implement the separating program. The main contents and results of this study are as follows:1. Based on the literature review and expert interviews, considering the characteristics of China cities, this dissertation develops a theoretical framework of residential behavior for separating household waste at source in China with the Theory of Planned Behavior and ABC theory as theoretical basis. According to the theoretical framework, those factors, as main research variables, are identified that have close relationship with residential behavior of source separation, that is, behavior intention, influencing factors, situational factors and demographical variables.2. Based on the theoretical framework of residential behavior of separating household waste at source in China, this dissertation develops a questionnaire which includes residential behavior for source separation, behavior intention, influencing factors, situational factors and demographical variables. By the means of random sampling, this dissertation tests the distribution of respondents, as well as the reliability and the validity of the questionnaire, which confirm that the data are suitable for statistic analysis. 3. This dissertation analyzes the relationships between behavior for source separation and its relevant factors systematically by means of the empirical research method. Statistic results show that behavior intention, including two dimensions of object intention and executive intention, is the independent variable of behavior for source separation. Object intention has stronger impact on behavior for source separation than executive intention. Mention behavior has seven independent variables, which have different impact power on behavior intention. From top to down, they are selfish environmental value, subjective norm, environmental attitude, altruistic environmental value, publicity and education, perceived barriers and perceived motivation. The result provides directions on how to promote residents to separate their waste at source.4. Situational factors are considered and then tested if they have moderating effects on the relationship between behavior intention and behavior. The result shows that one of situational factors, program type, has moderating effect on the relationship between object intention and behavior, which means that "Mandatory program" is a better way to transfer residential object intention to behavior for source separation. The other situational factor, system design, has moderating effect on the relationship between executive intention and behavior, which means that excellent system design, such as providing trash bins with clear signs in convenient sites for residents, keeping clean surrounding bins and providing collection service in time, can promote residents to transfer their executive intention to behavior for source separation.This dissertation reveals the relationships between residential behavior of separating household waste at source in China and its relevant factors, which provides an analysis tool and theoretical reference for promoting residents to implement source separation of household waste.