Altruistic, Egoistic, and Normative Effects on Curbside Recycling

Abstract

How altruistic, normative, and egoistic factors affect households’ participation in curbside recycling is shown to depend on how participation is measured. If expressed as whether a household participated, the importance of two normative factors (the expectations of household members and of friends and neighbors), an altruistic factor (that recycling helps protect the environment), and an egoistic factor (that recycling is inconvenient) appears similar. However, the altruistic factor has the greatest impact and the egoistic factor the least because of strong beliefs in curbside recycling’s environmental benefit and weak beliefs in its inconvenience. However, when measured by the proportion of different kinds of material a household recycles, the dominant influences are the expectations of other household members and inconvenience. The significance of egoistic concerns, namely, inconvenience and cost, is confirmed by negative attitudes toward user fees for garbage collection and toward drop-off depots as alternatives to curbside pickup.