۱- Introduction

۲- Review of related literature

۳- Methodology

۴- Data analysis

۵- Discussion, conclusion and recommendations

References

Abstract

Plastic consumption has been increasing globally, creating large amount of litter and posing threat to the environment. The recycling of the plastic waste can help in reducing it and its environmental threat. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the consumer’s return/recycling intention regarding plastic waste. Moreover, recycling behavior of consumer was explored in detail. The theory of planned behavior was adapted and extended to measure the determinants of recycling behavior. Survey research design was employed whereas data includes valid 243 households, collected through survey questionnaire, by employing purposive sampling. PLS-SEM was applied on the collected data for hypotheses testing. The finding of this study indicates that subjective norms, awareness consequences and convenience are major predictors of return/recycling intention. Whereas, hypothesis for the attitude, perceived behavioral control and moral norms were rejected and they all have insignificant impact on return/recycling intention. Moreover, return intention have positive significant impact on resell, reuse, dispose and donate. Reuse was the most predicted by the return intention. This study enriches the literature of reverse logistics helping to understand the consumers’ perspective. Provides the insights that will help government and organizations to understand consumers’ return/recycling intention and formulate such strategies that will increase the involvement of consumers in recycling activities.

Introduction

In this technologically advancing era, products with the environmental friendly features are rapidly emerging but plastic waste poses challenges to the societies regardless of this advancement (Huysman et al., 2017). Along with the changing lifestyle of consumers, the consumption of plastic have been increasing due to its convenient usage (Alam et al., 2018). Number of products in our daily life are made of plastic. The plastic waste includes most common single use plastic that includes: plastic bags, plastic bottles, disposal coffee/juice cups and lids, straws, plastic cutlery and food packaging (Johnston, 2017). Over the past 65 years, the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic has been produced. By end of 2015, the consumption of plastic has reached 297.5 million tons globally (http://plastic-pollution.org). If this trend continue then it is expected that by 2025, 12 billion tonnes (https:// cosmosmagazine.com) of plastic will be dumped in landfills and causing the environmental pollution. Moreover it has been pointed out that plastic contain the toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), nonylphenol (NP), organic pesticides, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and bisphenol A (BPA) (Webb et al., 2012) that cannot be simply dumped in soil. Nevertheless, plastic contain toxic and hazardous chemical that are released in environment if handled carelessly. In the past few years, the plastic pollution has been the alarming issue. United Nation stated that plastic is one of the substantial environmental threat faced by the world (Gabbatiss, 2018). Natural ecosystem has been negatively influence by plastic, initiating the complications for the human population and wildlife such as harming the plants life and posing danger to animals (Talpur, 2018). Moreover, air and soil are contaminated by toxic chemical that are released when plastic is burnt or buried in soil (Ilyas, 2018). Across the world, impact of plastic pollution in oceans is the developing issue (Laville and Taylor, 2017). Along the Pakistan coast, the plastic pollution is the growing concern and is getting worse due improper waste disposal system (Guriro, 2017). Faced with this grim situation, a proper waste management is required which can be better implemented by the help of reverse logistics. For proper waste management, most of the researchers have focused on recycling of the waste products.