Examining public attitudes and perceptions of waste sorting in China through an urban heterogeneity lens: A social media analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a global emergency and also has raised issues with waste management practices. This study emphasized the challenges of increased waste disposal during the COVID-19 crisis and its response practices. Data obtained from the scientific research papers, publications from the governments and multilateral organizations, and media reports were used to quantify the effect of the pandemic towards waste generation. A huge increase in the amount of used personal protective equipments (facemasks, gloves, and other protective stuffs) and wide distribution of infectious wastes from hospitals, health care facilities, and quarantined households was found. The amount of food and plastic waste also increased during the pandemic. These factors caused waste treatment facilities to be overwhelmed, forcing emergency treatment and disposals (e.g., co-disposal in a municipal solid waste incinerator, cement kilns, industrial furnaces, and deep burial) to ramp up processing capacity. This paper discussed the ways the operation of those facilities must be improved to cope with the challenge of handling medical waste, as well as working around the restrictions imposed due to COVID-19. The study also highlights the need for short, mid, and longer-term responses towards waste management during the pandemic. Furthermore, the practices discussed in this paper may provide an option for alternative approaches and development of sustainable strategies for mitigating similar pandemics in the future.

Waste sorting is essential to address the current predicament of waste management. Though it is important, insufficient attention has been paid to explore residents' waste sorting intention and behavior and understand its formation process. To narrow the research gap, this research built a theoretical research model by adding personal moral norms and waste sorting knowledge into the theory of planned behavior to explicate residents' waste sorting intention and behavior formation process. Meanwhile, given the discrepancy between waste sorting intention and actual behavior, this research also explored the effect of external conditions, such as incentive measures, on this discrepancy. Based on survey data from 397 Chinese residents, this research found that attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, personal moral norms and waste sorting knowledge were directly and significantly related to residents' waste sorting intention. Waste sorting knowledge also had an indirect influence on residents' waste sorting intention through attitudes and perceived behavioral control. Additionally, this research corroborated the discrepancy between waste sorting intention and behavior, and suggested that the link between intention and behavior was contingent on incentive measures. Incentive measures strengthened the effect of intention on behavior. This research is useful for understanding residents' waste sorting intention and behavior and valuable for encouraging residents to sort waste in their daily lives.