Clustering Spanish households E-waste disposal behavior using Self-Organizing Feature Maps

In this paper a Self-Organizing Feature Map (SOFM) is used to identify clusters of similar respondents to a survey of Spanish households on their behavior and habits with respect to the End-of-Life of electric and electronic products. The survey covered six common appliances and included more than twenty questions regarding the number of units in use, duration of previous appliances, reasons for buying each new appliance, details of the handling of the discarded appliances, etc as well as information on socio-demographic factors of respondents. Since most of the questions were of a discrete type the answers needed a coding/pre-processing phase. The SOFM approach considered a rectangular grid and in the case of all six appliances identified five clusters of respondents whose characteristic features were analyzed from the cluster prototypes provided by the SOFM.