Space oddity: How context matters in waste-sorting behavior

Abstract

The circular economy gives a prominent role to recycling, entailing the general implementation of waste sorting in private, semi-public, and public locations. Previous literature has extensively explored the psychological and contextual antecedents of waste-sorting behavior, but mainly with a focus on one specific setting, without considering how the sorting location might moderate the influence of these antecedents. To investigate this research question, we develop a dual-route model of waste-sorting behavior based on an integrated TPB-NAM framework. To test this model, we used a survey based on self-reported data considering three successive locations (i.e. home, university, and on the way to university) from the same 296 French college students and analyzed it using structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM). Although both psychological and contextual routes influence waste sorting, we show that their relative importance differs across locations. Furthermore, at university and on the way to university, the contextual route influences the psychological one. These results highlight why individuals’ self-reported waste-sorting behavior may vary across locations and call on academics to replicate pro-environmental behavior models across all relevant contexts before recommending public policies to promote them.