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Time allocation and recycling activities

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Abstract

Recycling is time consuming and the time available for housework may determine the intensity of recycling activities. In this study, we conducted a survey of 546 Japanese households and asked them their daily practice of five varieties of recycling activities: (1) choice of refill products, (2) use of own shopping bags, (3) sorting of recycled papers from burnable waste, (4) use of own drinking bottles when going out, and (5) use of recycle boxes prepared at the grocery store. We also asked households to record their behavior for two successive days. By combining recycling activity data and diary data, we estimate a multivariate probit model to empirically examine whether time available for housework determines the intensity of five varieties of recycling activities. The empirical result demonstrates that an individual that can allocate sufficient time for housework tends to purchase refill products. He or she also tends to bring their own shopping bags for grocery shopping. We also find that the size of house and the number of family members determine the likelihood of recycling. A housewife living with many family members in a large house is more likely to engage in time-consuming recycling activities.

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Notes

  1. Bruvoll et al. [2] investigated the recycling efforts of households and found that an average household spent approximately half an hour per week in cleaning, sorting, and transporting recyclable waste.

  2. Following the reviewer’s advice, we conducted the robustness check in this section. We would like to thank the referee for giving constructive comments.

  3. We obtained the minus sign for recycle box use. This result might suggest that people are using a recycle box on their commuting path.

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Acknowledgements

The author received financial support from the Institute of Economic Research of Aoyama Gakuin University and from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI (Grant number: 26340119). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2018 International Symposium on Economics and Social Science hold at Sapporo, Japan. I thank the symposium participants.

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  1. Department of Economics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Room 828, Building 8, 4-4-25 Shibuya, Shibuya, Tokyo, 150-8366, Japan

    Shigeru Matsumoto

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  1. Shigeru Matsumoto
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Correspondence to Shigeru Matsumoto.

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Matsumoto, S. Time allocation and recycling activities. J Mater Cycles Waste Manag 20, 2062–2067 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10163-018-0759-9

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