Home Composting Attitudes and Behaviours, 1999

The aim of the research project was to establish proof of concept that a virtual society can be constructed for simulating and optimising community-based integrated waste management planning. Specific objectives were:<br> to develop a distributed model of households with necessary and sufficient attributes to enable their waste management decisions to be simulated, and audit trails of waste through the households to be predicted;<br> to simulate (relevant) normative influences, collective actions, individual and coherent responses to external stimuli amongst the model households;<br> to develop technical models of in-community waste separation and composting, and to integrate these models with the sociological models to simulate the fate of waste from disposal to the point where its value can be realised by the community;<br> to research household composting, in detail, to compile case study information and to validate the proof of concept.<br> The dataset was gathered to provide indications of the major attitude and behavioural factors held by the home composter, particularly with reference to the take-up and drop-out from that activity. The dataset was aimed (i) at helping formulate the hypotheses from which model rules could be constructed and (ii) to provide indicative estimates for model parameter values and their possible variability amongst communities.<br> The dataset was derived from questionnaire surveys of home composters from four distinct samples: an estate in the village of Blackwood, South Lanarkshire, four villages in the Inverclyde district, a sample of residents in Fylde Borough, and a sample of Paisley University staff. The samples had been subjected to either a home composting promotional campaign in 1999 (University, Blackwood) or to a series of such campaigns over the last three years (Inverclyde, Fylde). Each sample comprised two groups: (a) those identified 'a-priori' who had taken up a promotional compost bin, and (b) those who had not taken a promotional bin, drawn from the same neighbourhoods as the takers.