Recycling note

rThe other day I visited a friend who happens to be an environmental officer with a Local Authority and I asked her what she thought about Malaysians attitude towards the recycling behaviour. In her opinion, the more wealthy a household is, the less keen they are to recycle their waste i.e the lazier they become and the more reliant they are on the local authority to dispose their waste. As we all know, unlike where some of us are temporarily studying and residing (eg. New Zealand and the UK), we in Malaysia don’t have any kerbside recycling (except I heard in Putrajaya and that is still in the pilot stage). Thus, we either have to send our recyclbales to the Pusat Kitar Semula Komuniti, to our children’s school or the paper lama pakcik comes a knocking or should I say comes with his loud speaker on…if you know what I mean.? Well, upon collecting a sample of questionnaires from a school (N=47) where 52% were boys and 48% were girls, I found there was a correlation (using Pearson’s r) between factors (or shall we say variables?) related to their perceived convenience (doValle et al. 2005) eg. satisfaction with the collection by LA or pakcik recycler or knowing where the recycling bins are located and the act to recycle. Also, I found that 57% of my respondents in this small sample think they might send recylcables to Pusat Kitar Semula if they have the convenience of time and transport. This also correlated significantly to their perception that Msians would prefer to sell to the pakcik recycler who conveniently comes right to your door step and even pays you 1-2 RM ( depending on the length of their index finger he he). Now, they don’t have that in NZ!