Retail Environmental Responsibility and the Consumer Waste Behaviour Gap: Evidence from South Africa

Abstract Retailers sit between production and household consumption, which makes their environmental corporate social responsibility programmes plausible instruments of behavioural change. Whether customer recognition of those programmes translates into waste management behaviour remains unclear in secondary cities of the global South, where recovery infrastructure is uneven. We surveyed 281 adult customers at two retail complexes in Mbombela, Mpumalanga, South Africa. The questionnaire measured awareness of environmental CSR, information channels, noticed initiatives, perceived effectiveness, perceived influence on waste behaviour, reported household recycling, participation in store led recovery schemes, changes in shopping practice, and barriers to sustainable consumption. We screened the captured data against the permitted response codes, decomposed multiple response items into binary indicators, and used Spearman rank correlations with Benjamini and Hochberg correction for 66 pairwise tests. Awareness was reported by 194 of 279 interpretable respondents, or 69.5%. However, only 75 respondents, or 26.7%, reported recycling household waste, and 147 of 281 reported regular or occasional participation in store led recovery schemes. Among respondents giving an interpretable answer, 187 of 228, or 82.0% believed that retailer initiatives had influenced their waste behaviour. Awareness was associated with perceived influence, but not with household recycling and store scheme participation. Education and age were more consistent correlates of scheme participation, while perceived barriers were more salient among respondents who reported greater engagement. The findings indicate that retailer CSR can be highly visible and persuasive at the level of perception without being sufficient to produce downstream waste behaviour. Consumer communication therefore needs to be coupled to accessible collection, sorting, and recovery systems.