What encourages households to sort waste: externally enabled conditions, internal incentives or economic enforcement?

Abstract

Municipal waste formation and management are contemporary issues in a modern world. Residents’ participation is very important trying to utilize and recycle it because municipal waste is mainly generated by households’. For this reason, waste collection and sorting at home becomes crucial starting point solving problems created by waste. Aiming to examine what encourages households to sort waste we analysed following: (i) is it enough to create waste sorting system to encourage households to sort waste or (ii) waste sorting habits depend on lifestyle, environmental awareness and socio-demographic characteristics, or (iii) there is a need to introduce economic incentives to stimulate waste sorting. Theoretical analysis revealed that the main factors potentially affecting sorting habits are infrastructure at municipal level, economic instruments, socio-demographic characteristics and individual motivation. Empirical survey of Siauliai city households grounded on chi-square statistics and estimations of logistic regression showed that internal incentives and externally enabled conditions highly impact households’ waste sorting behaviour. Moreover, results of the research clearly show that economic incentives embedded into existing waste management system are not strong enough to shape households’ behaviour.