The Impact of Product Type on Disposal Intentions

Despite early suggestions that product characteristics might play a significant role at the stage of disposition (Jacoby, Berning, and Dietvorst 1977), extant research focused largely on the impact of product characteristics on consumers’ choice and consumption, leaving the impact of product characteristics on disposition largely uninvestigated. Although empirical studies recently started to study the impact of several product characteristics such as form distortion and size on recycling intentions (Trudel and Argo 2013), the research is yet to identify the role of other product characteristics on disposition intentions. In the current research, we investigate how hedonism/utilitarianism dimension of a product impacts recycling versus trashing intentions. Based on past research suggesting that hedonic products evokes a sense of guilt (Strahilevitz and Myers 1998), we predict that hedonic products are more likely to be recycled than trashed. This prediction relies on the assertion that recycling is a compensatory behavior consumers actively engage in when they experience guilt related to a consumption act such as buying products with excessive packaging (Dahl, Honea, and Manchanda 2003). The disposition decision for utilitarian products, however, is likely to be different from decisions about hedonic products. Disposition of utilitarian products is generally not based on psychological obsolescence, which refers to replacing a product for symbolic reasons such as the product being unfashionable or less attractive (Cooper 2004). Rather, they are disposed due to physical obsolescence. In other words, consumers dispose of utilitarian products when they are no longer physically capable of conferring the practical utility they are used for due to raw material degradation. Consequently, consumers are likely to perceive little value from recycling utilitarian products—which are perceived to be depreciated—at the stage of disposition, leading to higher trashing intentions.