ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1634913
Psychological Drivers of Electric Vehicle Battery Recycling: The Impact of Place Attachment and Sustainable Attitudes
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Malaysia
- 2Huangshan University, Huangshan, China
- 3University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
- 4Anhui Xinhua University, Hefei, China
- 5Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia
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The rapid expansion of electric-vehicle adoption in China has intensified concerns about end-of-life management of power batteries. Despite increasing apprehensions about economic, social, and environmental sustainability 2021-2035, there has been a noticeable surge in scholarly interest directed towards formal power battery recycling. Although psychological drivers are key to participation through the lens of behavioral reasoning theory, the role of place attachment remains underexplored, particularly in collectivist cultures. Bridging this research lacuna, the current study offers an in-depth and holistic investigation of how the multidimensional facets of place attachment influence residents' economic, social, and environmental attitudes and how attitudes affect their intention towards formal recycling. Questionnaire data from 427 permanent residents of Hefei, a pilot city for electric-vehicle and battery-recycling initiatives, were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. The findings reveal that nature bonding is the strongest predictor across all three attitudes, economic attitude exerts the most powerful direct effect on recycling intention, and the combined sustainable attitudes explain 44.9 % of the formal recycling intention. These results demonstrate that stronger emotional and cognitive ties to one's locality significantly enhance pro-recycling attitudes, whereas attitudes affect the willingness to participate in formal power battery recycling channels. Effective power battery recycling campaigns in collectivist contexts should therefore move beyond generic appeals and leverage residents' specific attachments to their community's nature, economy, and social fabric. This study contributes to environmental psychology by integrating place-attachment constructs into a reasoning-based model of sustainable behavior, and offers actionable insights for municipal authorities, recycling firms, and community groups seeking to improve formal recycling rates and advance circular-economy objectives in rapidly urbanizing regions.
Keywords: place attachment, place identity, social bonding, natural bonding, sustainable attitude, intention to formal recycling
Received: 25 May 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cheng, Gao, Zhang and Khan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yi-cheng Zhang, zyc2019@mail.ustc.edu.cn
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