Research On The Formation Mechanism Of Resident’s Waste Separation Behavior

With the rapid development of China’s economy,the huge amount of waste has become a new problem.Compared with 2009,China’s urban solid waste output in 2019 reached 242.06 million tons,an increase of 53.85%.On the one hand,the current situation of "waste siege" is serious.On the other hand,China faces the dilemma in waste separation and waste management.At present,China’s waste separation standards are vague in definition,overlapping in concept and lack of guidance.In addition,the infrastructure construction of waste separation is too simple for residents to effectively do waste separation at the source,which leads to the classification difficulties in the process of collection and transportation.Municipal departments mix up the waste when they transport,which makes it difficult for residents to trust the waste collection system and further reduces residents’ willingness to separate waste.From the point of view of waste disposal methods,China’s waste disposal mainly adopts the way of landfill and incineration,which not only cannot effectively use resources,but also brings serious pollution.Domestic waste is the main problem of environment,but a kind of resource treasure to be excavated.To sum up,guiding residents to do a good job of waste separation has important and far-reaching significance.Based on the framework of Norm Activation Model,this study systematically explored residents’ intention and behavior of waste separation.The research shows that there is a significant positive correlation between residents’ awareness of the consequences and their ascription of responsibility,and both of them are significantly positive correlated with residents’ personal norms.There is a positive correlation between residents’ personal norms and their intention to separate waste.In addition,information publicity has a positive impact on residents’ intention.Although the degree of direct impact is small,this study finds that the degree of impact of information publicity depends on the quality of information publicity,that is,information quality positively moderates the impact of information publicity on intention.This study also confirmed the difference between residents’ intention and behavior,and pointed out that there is a positive correlation between incentive measures and residents’ behavior of waste separation,and incentive measures is helpful for residents to convert their intention of waste separation into behavior.This paper enriches the research content and perspective of residents’ waste separating behavior,and emphasizes the important role that information publicity and incentive measures play in residents’ waste separating behavior.Based on the conclusions,this paper discussed the policy suggestions to effectively guide residents to choose waste separation behavior,and also pointed out the limitations of the research done in this paper and the direction of future research.