Waste prevention and social preferences: the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations

- For food waste prevention, sustainable behaviour is firmly dependent on intrinsic motivations.
- 'Waste reducers' tend to exhibit a sort of altruistic motivation, which does not relate to social norm pressures.
- 'Waste reducers' are eventually different from 'recyclers' and obey to somewhat different incentives.

It is only recently that EU policies have started defining targets for waste reduction despite waste prevention being at the top of the 'waste hierarchy'. Against this backdrop, we examine whether individual behaviour towards waste reduction is more strongly driven by extrinsic motivations such as social norms, or intrinsic motivations, such as altruistic preferences. We exploit a new survey covering 22,759 individuals from EU27 countries. Our results suggest that individual preferences matter to move beyond an orientation based on recycling, to achieve a reduction of the sources of waste. Behaviour patterns which lead to waste reduction are seldom socially oriented, seldom exposed to peer pressure, and very reliant on purely 'altruistic' attitudes.