IBSS-Ex: Integrating Social Science and Systems Methodologies for Sustainability: Promoting Appropriate Waste-Disposal Practices in Low-Income Neighborhoods

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This interdisciplinary research project will explore the potential for a new approach to reduce trash accumulation and promote recycling in low-income urban neighborhoods. The project will demonstrate how different social science methods can be integrated to provide insights and answers useful in urban sustainability management. The investigators will bring together perspectives and approaches from behavioral science, decision and management sciences; econometrics and behavioral economics; and the social determinants of health. The project will provide new insights regarding the factors that influence waste-creation and -disposal practices, and it will assess the potential for different kinds of approaches to reduce litter, increase recycling, and improve urban environmental characteristics. The project will be conducted in low-income neighborhoods in the city of Baltimore, but it will provide new theoretical insights in a diverse range of other locales, and it will inform the development of programs and policies designed to promote urban neighborhood quality and sustainability. The investigators will work in collaboration with neighborhood residents, community associations, environmental organizations and city agencies to investigate the causes and to pilot test and evaluate solutions to the problem of urban trash accumulation. The project will provide valuable education and training opportunities for graduate students, and it will involve students from a number of high schools that have science programs with a health focus and with large numbers of students underrepresented in science and engineering in the U.S.This project will build on a pilot study conducted in early 2014 that identified four key factors contributing to the accumulation of solid waste in neighborhoods: (1) high turnover of tenants in rental properties; (2) landlords who do not provide trash containers, information about trash collection procedures, or access to the back alley to tenants; (3) difficulties faced by sanitation code enforcement officials given current laws; and (4) drug dealers and users who encourage trash accumulation because it helps conceal their activities from law enforcement officials. The investigators will integrate empirical and theoretical modeling methods from different social science fields to assess social and physical factors influencing waste creation and disposal practices and create measurement tools for evaluation of factors affecting waste creation and disposal. They will develop and test intervention packages designed to improve household and community waste management, and they will employ a systems-analysis approach for the evaluation of strategies. Four types of empirical analyses will inform the parameterization of the socio-physical decision sciences model. The first will be analyses of historical data for broad relationships between waste policies and the amounts of waste and litter. These data will provide a useful baseline and insights on correlations with policies but will not provide the fine-grained resolution needed for models of relationships between influences and choices. The second and third types will be laboratory experiments and field studies to generate individual and household-level data under more controlled conditions to identify relationships that are more causal in nature. The fourth will be questionnaire studies addressing attitudes towards proper and improper disposal methods, which will help identify which interventions will be received most positively by the public under given circumstances, with an emphasis placed on design features that can make a large difference in intervention effectiveness. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.