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Theorizing household plastic waste reduction in low-resource urban contexts: Integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior, social marketing, norms, and structural opportunity. A systematic literature review
Summary
This review of 80 studies finds that just wanting to reduce plastic waste isn't enough—people in cities with poor trash collection and recycling systems often can't follow through, even when they intend to. This "intention-behavior gap" matters because unmanaged plastic waste breaks down into microplastics that contaminate water, food, and eventually our bodies, so the researchers argue that fixing local infrastructure (like accessible recycling) is just as important as changing individual attitudes if we want less plastic pollution long-term.
Plastic waste pollution is a growing challenge in low-resource cities, where waste systems, governance, and market incentives are often weak. Although households are encouraged to reduce, reuse, sort, and recycle plastic, sustaining behavior change is difficult in infrastructure-constrained settings. This review examines how behavioral theories explain household plastic waste management in low-income urban areas, focusing on why intervention effects are often short-lived. Using Elicit’s Systematic Review workflow, 498 records were identified, 128 duplicates removed, 370 records screened, and 80 studies included for theory synthesis. The findings show that the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is the dominant explanatory framework, appearing in 12 studies and representing the most frequently applied theory. Evidence indicates moderate associations between TPB-related predictors and household waste behavior, with attitudes, subjective norms, moral norms, and perceived behavioral control shaping intention, and intention serving as the immediate predictor of behavior. However, the reviewed literature also reveals a persistent intention-behavior gap in infrastructure-poor environments, suggesting that intention-focused interventions alone are insufficient where households lack feasible opportunities to act. To address this limitation, the review proposes a parsimonious, role-based theoretical integration rather than additive theory stacking. TPB is retained as the central explanatory core, while community-based social marketing and norm activation are positioned as antecedents of attitudes and norms, structural opportunity as an enabling condition for perceived behavioral control, and policy awareness as a contextual moderator of intention-behavior translation. The resulting layered framework clarifies causal order, functional roles, and contextual boundaries for household plastic waste reduction in low-resource urban settings.