IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-05773399.html

Recyclable or Not?" Consumers Cognitive Mechanisms Involved in Recycling Household Waste

Author

Listed:
  • Elisa Monnot

    (CY - CY Cergy Paris Université, THEMA - Théorie économique, modélisation et applications - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - CY - CY Cergy Paris Université)

  • Fanny Reniou

    (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Governments encourage households to recycle their waste. It seems necessary to enrich research on individual barriers regarding recycling by looking at its cognitive dimension, including knowledge, representations and decision-making logic. The aim of this paper is to study the cognitive process that underlies waste recycling behaviour. A qualitative study, based on the observation of a recycling situation and on interviews with twenty-four consumers, highlights the recycling cognitive mechanisms. Using the categorization theory, it shows that individuals use their mental representations to classify waste around several cognitive categories and that this categorization can be disrupted by heuristics and cognitive biases as well as by situations of mental discomfort. Theoretically, the results enrich the categorization and behavioural decision theories. From a managerial and societal point of view, they help the stakeholders to implement actions in order to improve recycling.

Suggested Citation

  • Elisa Monnot & Fanny Reniou, 2020. "Recyclable or Not?" Consumers Cognitive Mechanisms Involved in Recycling Household Waste," Post-Print halshs-05773399, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-05773399
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-05773399. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.