Reducing Solid Waste

A survey of several communities was conducted to investigate the public’s response to solid waste issues. This study examines the relation between respondents’ beliefs about environmentally responsible consumerism and environmental attitudes, motives, and self-reported recycling behavior. The study addressed (a) the public’s perception of environment-related product attributes; (b) a sociodemographic characterization of environmentally concerned consumers; and (c) the depiction of the relations between attitudes, motives, recycling behavior, and environmental consumerism. The results indicated that respondents were most concerned about product toxicity and least concerned about product packaging. The data showed that only age and gender were predictive of respondents’ ratings. Several measures of general environmental concern, recycling attitudes, and recycling motives were found to be related to both categories of product attributes; when the measures were examined in combination, different measures were found to be related to each category. Respondents’ self-reported recycling behaviors were found to be related to source reduction and recycling.