Study On Multi-level Modeling With GIS In Recycling Behavior Model

With the rapid growth of economy and urbanization in China, a huge and ever-increasing volume of solid waste is generated. Improving waste management has become one of the key tasks of urban managements. One solution to this problem is recycling of domestic waste, which has been applied in many modern cities. It is obvious that, without public participations, recycling from domestic waste would not be possible. In order to support recycling projects, it is crucial to understand who recycles, how they recycle, and why they recycle. The main target of this research is to develop a method to analyse the recycling behaviour patterns that would help waste managers through the design of effective recycling programs. The specific objectives are twofold. The first is to understand the household recycling behaviour at multi-levels - the individual level and the aggregated levels based on the income. The second is to simulate the recycling program scenarios based on the models at the aggregated level and predict the outcome of the scenarios in low-income, middle-income, and high-income classes. At the individual level, a general disaggregated behaviour model for recycling was first constructed after literature reviews. Secondly, on the basis of this general model, a disaggregated recycling behaviour model was developed after studying the special characteristics in the study area. This model was further applied and validated using the data collected through the interviews (three hundreds in total) during the fieldwork. At the aggregate level, based on the result of the individual level study, the aggregated behaviour models for different income classes were developed. To demonstrate this aggregated model, GIS is used to simulate the recycling scenarios. The multi-level modelling integrated with GIS technique applied in this research could be helpful in understanding the recycling behaviour patterns.