Selective Sorting of Waste: A Study of Individual Behaviors

Our paper aims at understanding the determinants of households' selective waste sorting behavior. Based on data from an original survey of the French PACA Region of 694 individuals, we first apply polychoric principal components analysis to reduce the number of explanatory variables to a set of 7 factors. In a second step, we estimate the probability to sort waste as a function of those factors, using a probit model. The results of our empirical analysis show that the expected relationship between service quality and community recycling activity, and recycling, increases when communities implement an efficient infrastructure. The environmental preferences variables confirm the findings in the literature: proenvironmental preferences increase recycling, lack of environmental preferences has negative impact on social influences. The social influence on recycling behavior has been studied mostly by sociologists and psychologists rather than economists. Our results show also that social influence has a negative impact on recycling, which contrasts with most of the literature which finds a positive relationship of social influence on pro-environmental behavior.