A Sociological explanation of factors affecting waste recycling using the planned behavior theory in Abadan

The increasing production of urban waste is one of the most important problems of cities all over the world. An effective solution in this field is to improve citizens' environmental behavior such as waste recycling. This survey by means of the planned behavior theory, examines the waste recycling and the factors affecting it in the city of Abadan. The research population consisted of  people aged 15 and over of which 395 were selected using the multi-stage random sampling method. Research instruments for measuring waste recycling, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control were the researcher-made questionnaires, and to measure environmental attitudes, the New Environmental Paradigm scale prepared by Dunlop et al (2000) was employed. Based on the research findings, the relationship between environmental attitudes and subjective norms with waste recycling is positive and significant. Perceived behavior control in the internal dimension has a positive and significant relationship with waste recycling, but in the external dimension, this relationship is negative and significant. The waste recycling based on the educational groups is significantly different but the waste recycling among men and women, as well as single and married people, does not show a significant difference. Moreover, the results of the multivariate regression analysis showed that the independent variables are able to explain 0.28 of the variance of the dependent variable, among which the environmental attitudes had the largest contribution.