۱٫۱٫ Background

A recent surge of theoretical and empirical studies has shown that a pro-environmental intervention, or policy, focusing on defined target behaviours could also indirectly affect the residents’ other pro-environmental behaviours. For example, the need to separate the disposal of household waste into recycling and non-recycling bins may alert householders to their environmental responsibilities in general, manifesting in the more careful use of electricity for High Voltage Alternating Current (HVAC). This spinoff, or “positive spillover” (Thøgersen, 1999), as it is usually termed, has been detected in many domains such as energy consumption, waste disposal and climate governance (e.g. Lanzini and Thøgersen, 2014; Thøgersen and Noblet, 2012; Truelove et al., 2014; Steinhorst and Matthies, 2016). With the continuous and all-around environment crisis and limited success of direct environmental policies, especially in developing countries, knowledge of this spillover effect is clearly important for policymakers in developing improved pro-environmental strategies. Making simple and painless steps, such as providing information, incentives or facilities to encourage waste separation, functions as an indirect lever or “wedge” to obtain the far-reaching changes in consumption habits and lifestyles required to bring about the difficult private environmentally-friendly behaviours needed (Kunreuther and Weber, 2014; Vandenbergh et al., 2011; Allcott and Mullainathan, 2010; Steg and Vlek, 2009). China is presently undergoing a speedy economic transition and huge ecological deterioration. Extreme energy consumption and the rapid growth of solid waste are approaching alarming levels because the pollution they have caused is becoming the main threat to both the quality of residential life and urban sustainable development. Households have been especially known to be responsible for the highest overall electricity consumption compared to the Service & Commercial, Agriculture & Forestry sectors,1 as well as almost 9 percent of the total solid waste production of 246 large and medium cities (MEP, 2016), for which saving household electricity and waste separation are two major strategies in the environmental protection framework adopted by the Chinese government since the 1990s and early 21th century respectively. Governments and non-governmental organisations have advocated various large-scale awareness campaigns aimed at encouraging or inducing people to save household electricity, such as the annual nationwide “Energy Conservation Week” beginning in 1991, which focuses on disseminating information about the environmental and economic benefits of electricity conservation to the public through a variety of theme activities, but still with an average annual electricity consumption rise of 10.78% in the residential sector over 10 years.1 The need for the majority to conserve electricity (Du et al., 2017), and the little success of the isolated campaigns to date, calls for an innovation in behavioural change strategies.