Educating and promoting sustainable behaviours, such as participation in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) charging schemes, requires a thorough understanding of citizens’ opinions and perceptions and is a pressing global issue for governments. This echoes social listening for the sensible extraction, tracking, and assessment of online information on public sentiment and feedback to generate actionable insights (Reid and Duffy, 2018). However, studies analysing vast amounts of online content using generative artificial intelligence (AI) remain underexplored. Novel social media content analysis, combined with generative AI, is warranted to capture online discussions of the MSW scheme (Barari and Eisend, 2024). Hence, this study employed the five dimensions of the adaptive capacity framework (i.e., assets, flexibility, organisation, learning, and agency) to examine the public’s perceptions of sustainable behaviours related to the MSW charging scheme using social media data.

More than 8,000 social media posts related to MSW schemes were collected via the Cloudbreakr database. Analytical tools of ChatGPT and Google Colab, which were widely adopted in recent studies, were employed to conduct content analysis of these posts (Hu et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024). People’s sentiment score against the MSW scheme ranged from 1 (very negative) to 10 (very positive), with a weighted average of 3.91 on the negative side, with only 6.42% of comments reflecting people’s willingness to participate in the scheme. The findings provide valuable insights into the MSW charging scheme's adaptive capacity and guidance for policymakers on how to effectively communicate, promote, and implement waste charge policies to the public.

Authors:
Phoebe Wong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Kelvin So, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Helen Wong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Tony Wong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Phoebe Wong is a Senior Lecturer of the Division of Business and Hospitality Management, PolyU CPCE, Hong Kong.

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