Triggering sustainable plastics consumption behavior: Identifying consumer profiles across Europe and designing strategies to engage them

The overproduction and consumption of plastics has led to a global challenge of plastic pollution and waste. Cit-izens in particular have an important role to play as they interact with plastics constantly in their daily lives as consumers, but different plastics consumer profiles are hardly understood, resulting in a lack of tailored and ef-fective engagement strategies. This study identifies and analyzes sustainable plastics consumer profiles based on behavioral and psychological characteristics obtained through a large-scale survey deployed among 7600 re-spondents in eight European countries. The responses were subjected to regression modelling and a two-step cluster analysis. This study found personal responsibility and self-proclaimed knowledge to be critical variables affecting all stages of sustainable plastics consumption behavior (i.e. purchasing, using and disposing), as well as a factor differentiating consumer profiles. Concern and perceived consequences, on the other hand, are not found to be strong predictors of sustainable plastics consumption behavior. Four distinct social groups are iden-tified and labeled as Waste Warriors, Waste Conscious, Waste Moderate and Waste Laggards. The results of the cluster analysis confirm that the citizen profiles are heterogeneous with large differences in behavior, at-titudes, and perceptions related to plastics, indicating a need for differentiated engagement strategies. The results of this study enrich the literature on plastics sustainable consumption behavior and confirm the predicting power of various socio-demographic and psychological factors. In addition, the knowledge of the relative size, character-istics and unique needs of specific social groups related to plastics behavior are important for various stake-holders and key to develop suitable and effective marketing and policy plans to combat plastic pollution at a European scale.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

The overproduction and consumption of plastics has resulted in a global challenge of plastic pollution and waste. This study identifies and analyzes sustainable plastics consumer profiles based on behavioral and psychological characteristics obtained through a large-scale survey deployed among respondents in eight European countries. The study finds that personal responsibility and self-proclaimed knowledge are critical variables affecting sustainable plastics consumption behavior, as well as differentiating consumer profiles.