In this paper, meta-analysis was carried out to explore the influence of socio-economics, research design, theoretical construction, and measurement factors on the five paths among the elements of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The findings suggested that (i) subjective norm shows relatively poor explanatory efficacy due to narrow measurement range; (ii) perceived behavioral control shows the lowest explanatory efficacy because of missing the measurement of perceived control; (iii) there are too few items to measure the recycling intention, making the measurement inaccurate in reflecting participants’ psychological performance; (iv) the application accuracy of TPB increases with the sample size, which should be no less than 600; (v) introducing additional variables degrades the application accuracy of TPB in most cases due to their high correlation with standard elements; and (vi) research time, local economic level, participant’s characteristics, and waste type also affect the application accuracy. Finally, improvement suggestions were also provided.

Environmental management plays a key role in the sustainable development of cities. The effectiveness of environmental management is commonly examined through some evaluation schemes, but the effectiveness of such evaluation schemes also needs to be verified. As such, in this study, meta-evaluation was creatively introduced into environmental management to improve the evaluation of environmental management (EEM). Meta-evaluation is the evaluation of an evaluation scheme, and can verify and enhance the evaluation quality. First, a set of new meta-evaluation standards and criteria was proposed based on the unique characteristics of environmental management, which made meta-evaluation standards more adaptable and effective. After that, the efficacy of the proposed meta-evaluation standards was verified through their application to two evaluation schemes used in different fields of EEM. Based on meta-evaluation, suggestions for improving these two EEM schemes were also provided. The major contributions of this study are to introduce meta-evaluation into environmental management, establish new evaluation standards, and examine the efficacy of EEM. The research showed that it is critical to carry out meta-evaluation before and/or after the implementation of EEM.

Understanding why people do or do not perform household waste separation is a vital premise for designing relevant policies to promote waste management. As such, in this paper, an empirical study was carried out to explore the impacts of both rational choice and altruism factors on residents’ household waste separation behavior. Through the analysis of the survey sample (n = 1102) from Xi’an, China, using structural equation modeling, the main findings suggested that (i) the rational choice model can better explain such behavior, (ii) the altruism factor cannot directly affect household waste separation behavior, (iii) the altruism factor is highly correlated with the attitude determinant of household waste separation behavior, and (iv) rational choice models incorporating the altruism factor may have better explanatory efficacy. After that, some factors influencing residents’ altruism to household waste separation were identified. The main aim of this study was to compare two different tendencies in explaining sustainable behavior and help to find a better framework for behavior analysis.

Waste management plays a crucial role in sustainable development efforts in a national context. However, waste separation in rural areas has received limited research attention, restricting the generalizability of the urban-focused findings to these regions. Furthermore, the influence of policy interventions on waste separation behavior among rural residents remains poorly understood. Therefore, sustainability in rural areas is challenging. Here, we used a quasi-experimental design to examine the causal relationship between policy and rural residents’ waste separation behavior. We identify policy information perception as the key explanatory factor mediating this relationship and validate information dissemination as a robust instrumental variable for policy information perception. Furthermore, we explore the urban–rural disparities in policy information perception and provide recommendations to enhance policy effectiveness. These findings enhance the understanding of the behavioral mechanisms driving rural waste separation, explain how policy information influences ecological behavior from a perceptual perspective, and provide practical guidance for optimizing environmental policy implementation.