Household recycling and Millennials: A case study of the city of Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT

Increasing waste quantities are hampering the City of Johannesburg to prolong the lifespan of landfill sites while attempting to adopt an integrated solid waste management approach. Although all inhabitants need to play a meaningful role in reducing this burden, Millennials have an even more crucial contribution to make as they constitute 34.3% of the local population. By means of questionnaire-administered interviews, this case study investigated knowledge of recycling benefits, participation levels and reasons for non-participation among Millennials in Johannesburg. Five hypotheses were also tested to assess the relationship between recycling behaviour and socio-demographical attributes. It was found that although the majority of respondents understood the benefits of recycling, 61.1% were not involved in waste recycling. Also, the respondent's attributes did not influence their recycling behaviour. It is, therefore, recommended that the city's management should provide recycling facilities at accessible distances so that waste sorting and recovery rates can be enhanced.

KEYWORDS:

• Integrated solid waste management
• recycling programme
• millennials
• benefits
• participation

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of third year Geography students in the Department of Geography, Environmental Management & Energy Studies at the University of Johannesburg for the data collection phase of the research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).