The importance of achieving a high customer satisfaction with recycling services in communities

Some studies show that there are external, infrastructural, and economic factors that enable individuals and communities to act ecologically. A variable associated with sustainable behavior is the level of satisfaction with infrastructural and economic factors, which in turn relates to recycling behavior. The main aim of this study was to assess the reliability and validity of the customer satisfaction with recycling scale and to analyze its relationship with sociodemographic variables (age and gender), house location (in the center or the suburbs, population size of), and psychological variables (self-reported individual recycling behaviors, general satisfaction with recycling service companies, and the perception of costs and the quality of service). A total of 1498 individuals responded to the in-home questionnaire related to these variables. Exploratory and confirmatory factorial analyses confirm a good fit for a four-dimensional model: assurance, tangibles, empathy, and communication. Results show that those individuals who live in town centers tend to self-report higher levels of satisfaction with tangibles than those living in the suburbs. Population sizes correlate significantly and negatively with the four dimensions of service satisfaction, while age seems to relate significantly and negatively to all the studied variables. Finally, we discuss the implications regarding the importance of customer satisfaction in facilitating the environmentally responsible behavior.