A Study On Consumer Participation And Take-back Models Of Waste Household Electronic Appliances Management

With the rapid development of information technology, electronic products have updated faster and faster, which brings problem how to recycle waste household electronic appliances (WHEA). Developed countries have promulgated legislations to implement extended producer responsibility (EPR) in electronic industry, which requires manufacturers to undertake tack-back responsibility of end-of-life (EOL) products. Under multiple pressures such as resource, environment and international competition, Chinese governments and enterprises also initiated WHEA tack-back management. However, due to economic and culture issues, the WHEA tack-back management is not promoted smoothly in China. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the structure of WHEA tack-back management systems and identifying problems of the current management systems in China are necessary in order to propose feasible solutions for governments and enterprises to carry out WHEA tack-back management. For these reasons, this dissertation systematically studies consumer participation and take-back models of WHEA management based on relevant theories.Firstly, the structure of WHEA tack-back management systems is analyzed. In order to find out the key issues in the establishment of WHEA tack-back management systems in China, the management systems in the developed countries are compared with Chinese current management systems. The research on WHEA tack-back management is limited, but the practice related with WHEA tack-back management has been already carried out in developed countries and favorable performance has been obtained. The study of typical cases reveals the structure of WHEA tack-back management systems and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of various tack-back management systems. On the basis of the analysis on the current situation and existing problems of Chinese systems, the stakeholder analysis further confirms that one of bottleneck problems of WHEA tack-back management systems in China is that lack of consumer participation results in low return rate of waste household electronic appliances.Secondly, based on the stakeholder analysis of management systems, the tack-back participation behavior of Chinese consumers is studied deeply. The investigation with the samples of Chengdu residents shows that, the key influence factors are service motivation, behavior attitude, economic motivation, subjective norm and perceived barriers, and the influence levels decline in turn; environment knowledge does not have a direct impact on participation behavior intention, but has a direct impact on behavior attitude; the influence of publicity information has statistic significance in situational factors, and the enforcement of legislations has less effect on changing consumers' disposal behavior. The results provide powerful foundation for the constitution of relative legislations and policies and the establishment of WHEA tack-back management systems in China.Finally, based on the study of consumer participation behavior intention, three models are proposed, which can provide implications for enterprises to establish suitable WHEA tack-back management systems. In the process of WHEA tack-back, it is necessary for enterprises to comprehensively consider all kinds of factors and choose their own tack-back management model which is helpful to their development.The combination of quantitative and qualitative research is adopted in this dissertation. The WHEA tack-back management systems are systemically studied, which provides theoretical basis to constitute the legislations and policies for governments and build appropriate WHEA tack-back management systems for enterprises.