Resources and society

[3501-03-03] Recycling for material circulation and behavioural studies - a contextual comparison with policy related studies and research agenda

○Akiyuki Masuda¹, Shinsuke Murakami¹ (1. The University of Tokyo)

Chairman: Tsuyoshi Adachi (Akita university)

Keywords:consumer behaviour, material circulation, recycling, text mining

In recent years, importance of recycling is increasing in the context of stabilizing raw material supply in addition to environmental issues (EU's Circular Economy, etc.). As supply risk has gained more interest, linkage between consumer behaviour and criticality of raw materials has also increased with infiltration of devices such as electronic and electrical equipment as well as with advancement of functions. Consumer preferences and disposal behaviours can be risk factors for stability of raw material supply. Therefore, behavioural aspect is an important factor in understanding material circulation. However, in the research arena of disposal behaviours, hypothesis verification has been carried out chiefly for relationships between behaviours and determinants in the context of environmental issues (e.g. Azjen's Theory of Planned Behaviour). In this presentation, we first review behavioural research and outline current tendencies. We also visualize and compare the transition of context in behavioural research with recycling related policy research using a text mining method called topic model. Finally, we explore research agenda for utilising the outcomes and knowledge of behavioural research for material circulation policies. For the analysis data, we used research articles which were available from 25 to 216 in an English online database. For behavioural research, we focused on knowledge related part of questionnaires of Theory of Planned Behaviour and Value-Belief-Norm which are major empirical models. For recycling policy research, abstracts were used.