Recycling: Social norms and warm-glow revisited

By Andrew James Abbott, Shasikanta Nandeibam, L. O'Shea. 2013

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the role of social norms and warm-glow in a theoretical framework and establish that improving the quality of recycling facilities, for example through kerbside collection, will elicit more recycling effort if warm-glow is present. Drawing on the literature, we model the role of social norms with reference to age profile, ethnicity and geographical location of the reference group. Using English local authority data, we show that a social norm for recycling does exist. We find the expected relationship between the quality of kerbside provision and recycling activity, if the household derives warm-glow from the activity; however, it is insignificant. Amongst the control variables, we find evidence that multifamily dwellings recycle less.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c9344f53dc15259db3d28751fe0522d568dac20

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. N. Hanley
2. Karine Nyborg
3. Mikoaj Czajkowski
4. C. Spash
5. R. Turner
6. S. B. Olsen
7. Phoebe Koundouri
8. J. Kenter

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. Karine Nyborg
2. Mikoaj Czajkowski
3. N. Hanley

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. N. Hanley
2. Karine Nyborg
3. Mikoaj Czajkowski
4. C. Spash
5. R. Turner
6. U. Pascual
7. G. Wegner

Citations in the corpus

• Social Norms, Morals and Self-interest as Determinants of Pro-environment Behaviours: The Case of Household Recycling (2014, methodology): “Abbott et al. (2013) investigate the log of recycling volume per capita using data from English local authorities. They find that it is well explained by the quality of recycling infrastructure provided, and a “social norm”, which they construct as a mean level of recycling in a reference group of l”