Understanding Household Waste Sorting and Contamination Behaviour

This thesis explores consumer waste sorting and disposal behaviour to identify why consumers make disposal errors and contaminate household waste and recycling collections. This thesis includes a systematic literature review, qualitative study and experimental study to address the research questions; (1) What are the household waste sorting decision-making processes and behaviours undertaken before bin collection? (2) What leads people to contaminate their household waste? This thesis finds evidence to support categorisation error as a key contributing factor to contamination. Consumers do not have enough knowledge about waste and recycling rules and processes to correctly categorise waste items during disposal.