Psychological and Demographic Predictors of Plastic Bag Consumption in Transaction Data

Abstract

Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supermarket, but little is known about the individuals who are continuing to frequently purchase single-use plastic bags after the levy. In this study, we harnessed over a million loyalty card transaction records from a high-street health and beauty retailer linked to 12,968 questionnaire responses measuring demographics, shopping motivations, and individual differences. We utilised an exploratory machine learning approach to expose the demographic and psychological predictors of frequent plastic bag consumption. In the transaction data we identified 2,326 frequent single-use plastic bag buyers, which we matched randomly to infrequent buyers to create the balanced sub-sample we used for modelling (N=4,652). Frequent bag buyers spent more money in store, were younger, more likely to be male, less frugal, open to new experiences, and displeased with their appearance compared with infrequent bag buyers. Statistical regional differences also occurred. Interestingly, environmental concerns did not predict plastic bag consumption, highlighting the disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes and a specific ecological behaviour measured objectively in the real world.

How the Predictors of Math Achievement Change over Time: A Longitudinal Machine Learning Approach

“…This, alongside analyzing the patterns of SHAP importance in Figures 4 and 5, suggests that the relationships between the predictors in the dataset and math achievement are linear and independent -the impact of non-linear or interaction effects appeared limited. Similar results have been observed before for survey data using machine learning methods (e.g., Jacobucci & Grimm, 2020;Lavelle-Hill et al, 2020;Salganik et al, 2020). The detection of interaction effects in survey data is often underpowered (McClelland & Judd, 1993) and this may be the reason why we did not observe strong interaction effects.…”

Exploring the “Energy-Saving Personality Traits” in the Office and Household Situation: An Empirical Study

“…The TIPI inventory was developed by Gosling, Rentfrow and Swann [34] and has been widely employed in psychological studies on PEBs [17,55]. Lavelle-Hill et al [56], for example, employed the TIPI in a study on plastic bag consumption. In addition, Komatsu and Nishio [37] also adopted the Japanese version of the TIPI in a study on HESB.…”

Effect of Wheat and Oat Bran on the Physicochemical Properties of Edible Starch‐Based Films Obtained by Extrusion for Food Packaging Applications

“…[ 1,2 ] United Nations exposed that if the ways of managing waste are not modified, there will be about 12 billion tons of plastic residues in 2050, [ 3 ] being large part of them bags or packaging to protect food products. [ 4,5 ] To contribute with solutions, the scientific community has investigated the possibility of obtaining new environmentally friendly materials with the aim of replacing part of the synthetic one. [ 6–8 ]…”