Waste prevention in practice: Confronting public discourses about reusing, reducing, and recycling with consumers' perceptions of wasting material possessions

Dominique Roux () and Marie Schill ()
Additional contact information
Dominique Roux: REGARDS - Recherches en Économie Gestion AgroRessources Durabilité Santé- EA 6292 - URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne - MSH-URCA - Maison des Sciences Humaines de Champagne-Ardenne - URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Marie Schill: REGARDS - Recherches en Économie Gestion AgroRessources Durabilité Santé- EA 6292 - URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne - MSH-URCA - Maison des Sciences Humaines de Champagne-Ardenne - URCA - Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This research proposes a consumer perspective on waste prevention by examining how individuals cope with public discourses about reducing, reusing and recycling material possessions. We confront consumers' sayings and doings with three objectives put forward by public authorities about waste prevention: raising awareness, improving material efficacy, and promoting sustainable consumption. A qualitative-based methodology with 25 participants shows that waste is mostly equated with destroying and non-using objects, much less with buying as its primary trigger. Consumers also highlight the difficulty to fully optimize the use of their products as well as the lack of channels to recirculate unwanted, unused or broken things. Finally, they show that objects tend to stagnate in the home, a reality that is inadequately captured by public authorities through waste collection and recycling systems.

Keywords: waste prevention; material possessions; public policy discourses (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02877091
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in 48th Annual Conference for the European Marketing .(EMAC ), May 2019, Hamburg, Germany

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02877091/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:journl:hal-02877091

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().