Pesticides are important for improving agricultural productivity and ensuring global food security1,2. However, with the massive use of pesticides in rural areas, pollution from pesticide packaging waste (PPW) has become a major issue3. China, a large agricultural country, produces up to 10 billion pesticide packages annually, more than three billion of which are casually discarded, comprising approximately 100,000 tons of waste4. Pesticide packaging is often made of glass or plastic and is not readily degradable5, resulting in the deterioration of the agricultural production environment6. Moreover, PPW often contains 2–5% pesticide residue7,8, which can affect the safety of the food supply chain. It is urgent, then, to improve PPW management to support green agricultural development9,10.As important participants in PPW treatment, farmers are the main link for improving its efficiency11. China has contractually cooperated with farmers through project-based policies and public service outsourcing to standardize the performance of farmers’ duties12,13. Although regulations have produced some achievements in PPW treatment, farmers’ enthusiasm for PPW participation is generally low14, and the recovery rate is less than 15%15. The reason for this is that PPW treatment is a public good for which farmers typically pay no cost, and free-riding behavior subsequently emerges16, which makes it difficult for individuals and collectives to achieve effective cost-sharing, resulting in collective action dilemmas17. In addition, approximately 63% of cultivated land in China is operated by approximately 200 million small farmers18, and small-scale, decentralized, single-household operation increases the difficulty of PPW treatment19. Thus, it is important to determine how to improve farmers’ initiative and participation in PPW treatment.
Farmers’ behaviors are driven by intrinsic motivation, and ecoliteracy can enhance intrinsic motivation for environmental behaviors20. The related research has mainly focused on, first, ecoliteracy’s effect on individual environmental protection behaviors. Using ecoliteracy models, researchers have formed research paradigms based on factors such as ecological cognition, emotion, values, and knowledge and skills21,22,23. These can serve as self-restraints for individuals and promote their environmental protection behaviors24. For example, farmers’ ecological cognition and skills positively influence their agricultural environmental protection behaviors25. High awareness of responsibility can convert farmers’ willingness to participate (WTP) in environmental improvement into actual behavior26. Positive environmental attitudes can, moreover, promote waste disposal behavior by individual households27. Second, studies have investigated the influence of psychological factors on farmers’ PPW governance behaviors. Behavioral economics theory suggests that decision-making behavior is characterized by uncertainty; in this regard, psychological factors can be used to scientifically analyze decision-making behavior28,29. Studies have explored the various influence paths using the theory of planned behavior and its extensions. For example, using perceived value theory, Li30 found that perceived benefit was the most important factor influencing farmers’ green waste disposal behaviors. Meanwhile, Lina31 used attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and other internal psychological mechanisms to identify the behavioral logic of PPW governance among fruit farmers. Using an environmental social psychology approach, Cai32 found that supportive attitudes positively affected PPW recycling among rice farmers in Guangdong Province. Wang33 found that increases in farmers’ ecological cognition made them more inclined to adopt PPW recycling. Others, meanwhile, have focused on the effect of endowment heterogeneity on farmers’ behavioral decisions based on factor endowment theory. Whether farmers implement PPW governance depends on household resource endowment34,35, education36, and income37, and differences in endowment can lead to different behavioral responses.
While existing studies can provide a reference for the present study, there is room for supplementation and improvement. First, most studies analyze ecoliteracy and farmers’ environmental governance behavior as independent research objects and do not incorporate ecoliteracy and PPW governance behavior into a unified framework. Moreover, the mechanism of the ecoliteracy indicators of different dimensions in farmers’ behaviors has not been explored in detail. Second, studies of PPW governance tend to treat farmers as a homogeneous group, ignoring heterogeneity in their PPW governance behavior. Third, PPW management includes “organization–recovery–disposal” links, and studies tend to focus on the effect of farmers’ participation in PPW recycling without embedding them in the whole chain of PPW governance.
In light of the above, this study applies structural equation modeling (SEM) to data from 1,118 farmers in Hebei Province, China, to empirically investigate ecoliteracy’s effect on PPW governance participation. We further reveal heterogeneity in farm household PPW governance participation, aiming to provide empirical evidence and a decision-making reference for promoting PPW governance and the green transformation of agriculture.
This study’s contributions are as follows. First, we construct a theoretical model comprising “ecoliteracy–farmers’ WTP in PPW governance–participation in PPW governance behavior.” We establish an ecoliteracy indicator system in four dimensions: ecological cognition, ecological emotion, ecological values, and ecological knowledge and skills. SEM is used to clarify the influence of different ecoliteracy dimensions on farmers’ WTP in PPW governance and behaviors. Second, considering the whole chain of PPW management, farmers’ PPW management behaviors are refined into recycling behavior, centralized disposal behavior, and community supervision behavior. Third, we explore the effect of farmers’ heterogeneity on their PPW governance participation. Farmers are grouped according to cultivation category, cultivation scale, and whether they receive government support; multicluster SEM is used to clarify the differences between the influence pathways.
In the present study, we present the study’s theoretical framework and hypotheses in Section 2. Section 3 describes the research method, and section 4 presents the results. Section 5 discusses the findings, and section 6 concludes this paper.