Systematic, quality appraisal of household recycling influences research finds evidence is mostly insufficient

摘要: 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 review aims to fill this gap by developing and piloting a bespoke quality appraisal framework, specifically tailored to the needs of interdisciplinary reviews of the influences on recycling and other pre-environmental behaviours. Application of the bespoke framework to a set of 81 systematically selected recycling papers highlights the substantial lack of causal evidence and the weak construct validity of measured ‘behaviour’. These quality issues undermine the ability of individual studies and the body of literature as a whole to draw strong conclusions about what factors have causal influence on real-world recycling behaviour in broad populations of interest. At the same time, this review identifies instances of better practice and key future directions to improve the quality of research and confidence in what influences household recycling behaviour.