Understanding the Effect of Internal and External Factors on Households’ Willingness to Sort Waste in Dammam City, Saudi Arabia

Ossama Ahmed Labib, Latifah Manaf, Amir Hamzah Sharaai and Siti Sarah Mohamad Zaid
Additional contact information
Ossama Ahmed Labib: Department of Environment, Faculty of Forestry and Environment, Universiti Putra Malaysia, UPM, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Latifah Manaf: Department of Environment, Faculty of Forestry and Environment, Universiti Putra Malaysia, UPM, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Amir Hamzah Sharaai: Department of Environment, Faculty of Forestry and Environment, Universiti Putra Malaysia, UPM, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Siti Sarah Mohamad Zaid: Department of Environment, Faculty of Forestry and Environment, Universiti Putra Malaysia, UPM, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 18, 1-18

Abstract: The acceleration of growth in the population in Saudi Arabia and the increase in municipal solid waste generation have caused a problem in Dammam city: an increase in solid waste production. Therefore, solid waste sorting is an important practice of municipal solid waste management. The main objectives in this research are understanding the effect of internal and external factors on household willingness in sorting waste in Dammam city and studying the attempts to construct a theoretical research model by adding market incentives, government facilitators, and awareness into the popular planned behaviour theory to explain residents’ waste sorting intentions. The data collection and analysis are based on the questionnaire study, which is based on the questionnaire survey data from 450 households in Dammam. This study revealed that social influence significantly predicts households’ willingness to sort and recycle, that is, to promote recycling. Additionally, the variable social influence has a significant but low influence on households’ willingness to sort and recycle. The result of the structural equation model shows that perceived behavioural control significantly predicts households’ willingness to sort and recycle waste. This finding is consistent with the theoretical expectation. Therefore, this research shows that attitude, social influence, perceived behavioural control, market incentives, government facilitators and awareness positively and significantly affect residents’ waste sorting intentions. Additionally, this research corroborates the discrepancy between internal and external variables.

Keywords: solid waste management; waste sorting and recycling; psychological factors; awareness; market incentives; government facilitators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/18/9685/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/18/9685/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:18:p:9685-:d:635394

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().