Household Waste Segregation: Lessons from Poland

Abstract: One of the problems facing the world in the twenty-first century is the management of municipal waste, a problem where the household plays a key role in the process through its interaction with the municipal waste management system. How this interaction works is dependant not only on the design of the municipal waste management system, but also on the individual households. This study introduces the topic of household waste segregation, and finds that there is a lack of research with regard to how the various parameters of the dwelling affect the rate of waste segregation in households. To address this lack of research, a review of previous studies from a variety of disciplinary fields was made, based on which a survey study was conducted through social media. The study which was performed in Poland had a total of 50 local respondents. To better understand the scale and importance of the underlying processes, a mixed methods approach was taken, where both qualitative and quantitative data were put through a three-step quantitative analysis to provide different perspectives. The first two steps analysed the correlations between various pairs of variables through a bivariate analysis and explored the relationships between various obstacles to household waste segregation as reported by the householders. Whilst this was enough to provide a limited understanding of the data, to understand the overall importance of these various factors in relationship to one another, a third step utilising a non-linear multivariate analysis was performed using a multilayer perceptron procedure which utilises machine learning to create a predictive model. The results indicate that the most important factor that influences household waste segregation is the willingness to exert effort, which can overcome obstacles faced in the process. The most frequent of these obstacles which was specified by 46% of the respondents is the availability of space at home to perform the segregation of waste, followed by the recyclability of waste which had 18%. The spatial factors ranked highly with regard to the householders’ rate of segregation, with the number of rooms per person ranking as the most important after the willingness to exert effort. In conclusion, the data in this study indicates that the most efficient ways to improve the rate of waste segregation among householders is through increasing the incentive to segregate waste, combined with the simplification of the recycling process through means that take into account the effort and space required, such as a reduction of categories into which waste needs to be segregated.