Social interaction and recycling of waste mulch film: Understanding the impacts of communication channels

To control plastic pollution, it is imperative to encourage and facilitate waste mulch film (WMF) recycling by farmer cooperative members. We investigate the WMF recycling behavior of farmers in several randomly selected regions from the main vegetable-producing provinces in China. Propensity score matching is used to study the impacts of face-to-face, telephone, and social media communication on WMF recycling behavior of farmers. Our study shows that face-to-face communication is still the most important channel to promote farmers’ recycling behavior. Therefore, while it is more efficient to promote WMF recycling through social media in the Internet age, cooperative managers should not underestimate the role of face-to-face communication which is the preferred communication channel for many small farmers according to our analysis. Cooperative managers can better promote their members’ WMF recycling behavior through both social media and face-to-face communication.