Behavioural attitudes towards waste prevention and recycling

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between individual motivations and recycling and minimisation behaviours. Exploiting an original survey of 618 Italian households, we conducted a cluster analysis on individual motivations to identify the main motivation groups among respondents. In a second step, we used these clusters as independent variables in a simple regression framework to test their correlation with recycling and minimisation variables. Overall, the results show that recycling behaviour does not correlate with individual motivations, while waste minimisation seems to be associated with intrinsic motivation only.