environmental sustainability for a long period of time such as the Netherlands (Goorhuis et al., 2012) is still relatively unexplored. It is of high interest if a population of a “green” country acts more conscious regarding their management of waste compared to a population where the engagement to pro-environmentally behaviour is not as permeated.

Therefore, this study will focus on the waste management behaviour of households in case of the Netherlands. As a theoretical framework, the paper will use the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) which is commonly used in environmental behavioural research. The TPB is an expectancy-value model claiming that the intention of individuals to perform a certain behaviour can be predicted from their attitude, subjective norms and the perceived behavioural control towards a certain subject (Ajzen, 1991).

The contribution of this paper will add knowledge about the impact of societal commitment on the individual motivation to act in a pro-environmental way and ultimately on the knowledge, attitude and behaviour of individuals. The study thereby aims at deepening our understanding of the roles of private households and their impact on in the transition towards a more sustainable society (Grønhøj & Thøgersen,2017).

Following this short introduction and theoretical framework, a definition of the independent and dependent variable as well as of the theory will be given in the next section. The third section of the paper will provide the methodological approach including an explanation of the questionnaire content. The last section will provide strengths and limitations of the study as well as ethical aspects.