Systematic, quality appraisal of household recycling influences research finds evidence is mostly insufficient
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Research on recycling behaviour and its influences can play a key role in supporting public policy efforts to mitigate the negative effects of waste generation and landfilling. However, recent reviews have raised concerns about the quality of research on recycling behaviour. Despite this, no previous reviews have conducted quality appraisals to judge the extent and impact of quality issues. This is partly due to the difficulty of applying validated quality appraisal tools developed for intervention reviews in the health and medicine fields to behaviour influence reviews in environment and sustainability fields. This update of a previous systematic review aims to fill this gap by developing and piloting a novel quality appraisal framework, specifically tailored to the needs of interdisciplinary reviews of the influences on recycling and other pre-environmental behaviours. Application of the novel framework to a set of 118 recycling papers highlighted a substantial lack of causal evidence and weak construct validity of measured ‘behaviour’. These quality issues undermine the ability of individual studies and the body of literature as a whole to firstly, draw strong conclusions about what factors have causal influence on real-world recycling behaviour in broad populations of interest, and secondly, therefore, to guide interventions to improve recycling outcomes. To improve future research, this review identifies instances of better practice to increase the quality of evidence and the field’s confidence in what influences household recycling, and potentially, other pro-environmental behaviour.
Source: SocArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7154658613