ABSTRACT
This book focuses on the issue of household waste management and how understanding individual attitudes and behaviours can make a significant contribution to an appreciation of what factors shape behaviour and how these might be changed. Waste is, of course, only one environmental behaviour where this can be appreciated. As the forthcoming paragraphs demonstrate, the world faces a plethora of inter-related environmental problems. The programme that has been institutionalised at the highest governmental level globally is 'sustainable development'. This ambitious project, integrating environmental, social and economic goals, faces many challenges, from basic definition to practical implementation. Yet the underlying challenge facing academics and policy makers today is not necessarily an environmental or fiscal one, but social. Until the majority of people change their attitudes towards the environment and sustainability and, until their behaviours change as well, the search for a sustainable future for the earth will elude us. The prospect of using a social understanding of environmental problems is one that has the potential to make the realisation of environmental sustainability more tangible than ever before. First, however, sustainable development and its challenges must be fully placed in context.
