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This paper aims to explore student perceptions of recycling and explore whether one university’s strategy helped or hindered student recycling in their university's halls of residence. There is near-universal acknowledgement of the urgency of the climate crisis, yet household recycling rates remain low at 45.2%. Student-recycling rates have been suggested to be even lower. After a brief consideration of the recent history of sustainability and recycling, this paper identifies the actions required to increase student recycling, including peer influence, education and information, physical structures and attitudes and motivations.

Twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews were undertaken at one Southern English university. The rich, qualitative data obtained were then analysed thematically. The theory of environmentally significant behaviour provided a framework for understanding perceptions and behaviours in that site.

Confirming aspects of existing literature, students’ recycling behaviours were found to be limited through lack of perceived ability, lack of facilities and unconfident knowledge. Students were also found to be limiting their own actions. A holistic approach including peer influence, education and information, physical structures and attitudes and motivations was recommended.

There is little research into student recycling behaviours and limited literature concerning halls of residence, especially in the UK. This paper draws on one case to add to nascent understandings. While limited to one site and by sample size, a number of recommendations are made, covering university facilities, student empowerment and individual responsibility to increase future recycling.

Buoyed by the desire to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and develop sustainable urban transportation, the dockless bike-sharing industry boomed in China during 2017–2018. To the surprise of the stakeholders, this industry dramatically ebbed in 2019. The dockless bike-sharing system deviated from a problem-solver to a troublemaker in a very short period. The oversupplied and excessively discarded shared bikes caused a big waste of resources and serious pollution to the environment. In this paper, the decision-making of the key players of the industry, i.e. business operators, investors, customers and government, is analyzed through the lens of the cognitive bias. This paper aims to illuminate the process of how this innovative transport solution turned to a disastrous ending, which caused damage to urban environment and financial loss to investors.

In this study, a qualitative analysis based on the rich secondary data sources is conducted. A rich amount of qualitative data including news reports, government policies, consulting reports and companies’ annual reports etc. were collected.

The study shows, in the product introduction period, the government, business operators, investors and consumers fell into the cognitive bias. They over focused on the positive side such as high-tech, eco-friendly, convenient image of the dockless bike-sharing solution. Thereby, the key stakeholders made irrational decisions in product adoption and management. This study moves toward increasing key stakeholders’ awareness of the imperative to reduce these biases when promoting eco-innovations. This study also recommends a prudent attitude with a rational and comprehensive thinking style in dealing with eco-innovation and the emerging sharing economy.

To solve the cognitive biases, this study recommends that people use rational decision-making style to examine and adopt the dockless bike-sharing solutions. Practical recommendations to tackle the existing recycling crisis of the dockless bike-sharing industry are also discussed.

More than 30 legal recyclables were proclaimed by Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) in Taiwan of those producers and importers are liable for paying a Resource Recycling Fee (RRF). The Resource Recycling Management Fund determines both the tariff of RRF and the subsidy rate for recycling activities based on a predetermined pricing formula and collects the revenue to finance its collection and disposal. While contemplating on whether to proclaim waste mattress as a legal recyclable, EPA is facing several critical challenges, particularly the lack of data required for setting a tariff–subsidy mix. In this chapter we critically review the formula and propose an innovative pricing rule. Also, we develop a science-based approach to demonstrate how a tariff–subsidy mix could be determined under the circumstance of data deficiency. By doing so, we avoid not only the difficulty in solving the nonhomogeneous and nonautonomous first-order difference equation that governs the stock accumulation of waste mattress but also the distributed lag model of multiperiods linking quantity of mattress discarded and the quantity of new mattress sold. Such an approach could be applied to the durables for recycling pricing particularly when relevant data are limited.

In 1978 the plastic bottle was introduced nationwide. In the thirteen years since that historic (and some say environmentally devastating) occasion, the consumer increasingly has embraced plastic packaging. Each American uses about 190 pounds of plastic per year, according to Earthworks Group, and about 60 pounds of it is discarded within minutes or seconds after opening. The plastic bottle is king. American consumers use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors’ own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception.

Recycling has experienced rapid growth as a technique to reduce the solid waste stream volume. Despite the public appeal and acceptance of recycling, the reverse logistics channels used in recycling have received minimal attention. However, the reverse channels′ membership and capabilities have a significant impact on the efficiency of processing recyclable material for remanufacture into recycled products. Differing product characteristics, extensive handling, and low density shipments pose considerable obstacles to establishing an efficient reverse channel for recyclable commodities. A framework, based on interviews and current literature, describes the reverse logistics channel structure, membership and functions, and provides a foundation for identifying the issues affecting efficiency and marketability, and possible future directions for improving efficiency within the reverse channel structure.

Sustainability is a major concern in education policies. This paper aims to describe how alternative economic education including concepts of the circular economy (CE), cradle to cradle (C2C) and zero waste can be addressed by teacher education. The author asks to what extent such alternative concepts contribute to sustainability education and transitions and empower students and future teachers, through fieldtrips.

Fieldtrips to three extracurricular learning places in Graz (Austria) – a plastic waste disposal facility, an upcycling design atelier and a supermarket without packaging – were organized as part of a university seminar on economy and sustainability. Based on student essays reflecting the fieldtrips, this praxeological paper provides insights on how students perceive awareness-raising and innovative responses to mass consumption, recycling/upcycling and waste prevention issues.

Including altermatic economic frameworks, such as CE/C2C and zero waste, into teacher education contributes to reflections on the economic growth paradigm and promotes more sustainable futures. In various statements, students highlighted social-ecological change and awareness-raising. They rather focussed on recycling, upcycling and (plastic) packaging than on the problematic eco-efficiency of downcycling.

Alternative economic concepts can be addressed and critically reflected in sustainability education, even if rarely taught. Although the extracurricular learning places described offer partial solution from the perspective of degrowth, they can serve as an eye-opener and promote alternative economic education, where students can share experiences, knowledge and creative ideas to engage in sustainability transitions.

The purpose of this study was to verify the effect of sustainable consumption on the intention and effective purchase of products by young undergraduates, using the framework with the dimensions: consciousness for sustainable consumption, moral orientation and environmental concern. The authors also examined the mediation effect of intention and searched for heterogeneities on the purchase of sustainable products when discriminating by product type.

Sustainable consumption assumes ethics and environmental concern prioritization in the role of individuals to preserve natural resources threatened by global warming. Considering this, the authors developed cross-sectional research based on a sample of 265 Brazilian higher education students, which was analyzed with the use of partial least squares path modeling.

The results showed a positive relationship between sustainable consumption and buying intention, with mediation effects on the effective purchase of sustainable products. It was evidenced that consciousness for sustainable consumption, moral orientation and environmental concern do not lead directly to the purchase of sustainable products; they are based on the mediation exerted by the intention that purchase materializes in Brazilian, young university students. By analyzing heterogeneities, the authors found that environmental concern may translate into actual purchase when product-oriented.

This study uses the VBN theory to understand the behavioral intentions for the effective purchase of sustainable products, extending the range of sustainable consumption associating factors not analyzed in the higher education context, including nontraditional categories of sustainable products, such as textiles, furniture and wood articles. Moreover, this paper examines the mediation role of intention for effective purchase of sustainable products, identifying product categories that may translate environmental concerns to actual purchases, highlighting the importance of Brazil as an emerging economy that is a leading producer and exporter of organic foods with a growing market for sustainable products.

Supporting and communicating with citizens is a vital part of societal crisis management. Training exercises may offer an opportunity to develop capabilities among managers in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to examine this potential in an analysis of how citizens were portrayed and perceived by participants in a major crisis management exercise.

Observation, document analysis and short interviews during the exercise were used as data collection methods. Data were subjected to thematic analysis to capture core themes in relation to the research aim.

Patterns in how citizens’ reactions were portrayed in the exercise were identified to form a citizen behaviour typology. Observations during the exercise also demonstrated some of the challenges in incorporating the citizen perspective. However, findings regarding the perception of the citizen perspective also demonstrate the ability of exercise participants to meet and respond to public behaviours with respect and seriousness.

Variation is an important condition for learning in exercises, and the identified typology is suggested as a starting point for achieving this in incorporation of the citizen perspective in training scenarios. The results of the study are discussed in terms of a learning framework with the aim of explicitly developing crisis managers’ ability to interact and communicate with citizens in crisis situations.