Psychology can be used to help push the recycling message to UK households, as Jessica Prendergrast and Helen Tomlinson explain ‘I recycle boys'. If proof was needed that the recycling message has finally permeated the UK's popular consciousness, this is surely it: A T-shirt for empowered teenage girls emblazoned with the now-familiar green, clockwise arrows which signify that something is ‘recyclable'. Even in the UK, where recycling rates trail behind the impressive lead set by Switzerland and the Netherlands, recycling has been a relative success story. Local councils' recycling rates now top 30%, and more than two-thirds of the population claim to be regular recyclers. Despite this, the UK has a long way to go to catch up with its Continental neighbours. Pressingly, a failure to meet landfill-reduction targets will mean massive fines for councils and council taxpayers. Waste disposal sits alongside a number of serious policy challenges, such as tackling obesity, where changing individual behaviours is crucial to success. In any such endeavour, a range of drivers of individual behaviour exist. Ultimately, the aim is to turn individuals into life-long recyclers – making recycling such a habitual behaviour that it becomes automated. This is the point at which individuals consciously take note of their recycling behaviour only when it is impeded – an equivalent would be asking people to travel in a car that is not equipped with seatbelts. The most obvious barrier to habitualising recycling and composting has been access to facilities. With inconvenience, time constraints and the required personal effort the most-cited obstacles, simply making recycling more convenient has had a very positive impact, and the provision of kerbside recycling has rapidly increased recycling rates. Nonetheless, a recent survey by DEFRA revealed a lack of doorstep collection to be the largest reported barrier to recycling. Suggested innovations to encourage further participation include the redesign of collection boxes which fit more easily into people's homes, and the provision of purpose-built storage space in new housing developments. At the same time, the move to bi-weekly general waste collections aim to make undesirable behaviours harder, and information campaigns tackle barriers around low awareness and a lack of knowledge. Here simple, clear and consistent messages are key. Another common way of influencing behaviour is to offer monetary incentives. For example, rewards can help entrench good recycling habits, by introducing an element of financial gain. For example, in 2005, Dorset CC introduced its recycling lottery, where people were encouraged to put their contact details into glasses and jars they recycled in order to win prizes. Such schemes, now widely adopted by local authorities, help kick-start a recycling habit and play a useful role as ‘foot-in-the-door' strategies. Larger-scale financial incentive schemes also have the potential to make a notable impact – making non-compliance hard on the wallet. But, with the prospect of a widespread introduction of pay-as-you-throw rubbish charging now pushed into the distance, if not quite off the horizon, councils will need to find other ways to encourage people to change their waste-disposal habits. Happily, the fact that so many people willingly recycle, despite the lack of coercion or obvious inducements, suggests that, encouraging more recycling needn't be reliant on creating fiscal incentives. Indeed, examined through the lens of classical economic theory, it is not unwillingness to recycle that is puzzling but the fact that anybody bothers to do so at all. Recycling is a surprising success when one considers that there is, on the face of it, very little ‘in it' for the individual. A crucial explanatory factor here is that people are convinced recycling is worthwhile. Many people, who simply wouldn't dream of not recycling their jam jars, happily jump into the car to drive to the supermarket and purchase more of them. If anything, people seem to be a bit too convinced of the efficacy of recycling – an Ipsos MORI survey in 2007 found that 40% of people questioned considered recycling the activity that did most to help reduce climate change. While this may present a problem for other encouraging other pro-environmental behaviours – people think that by recycling they have ‘done their bit' – it does give recycling a notable advantage. For, whatever reason, the sense of pointlessness that often prevents proactive engagement with other ‘green' behaviours, does not apply to recycling. And the inflated conception of the importance of recycling and waste disposal in efforts to curb greenhouse emissions is reflected in people's attitudes – with more than 80% of respondents to the DEFRA survey agreeing that people had a ‘duty' to recycle. This sense of duty points to a fruitful area of non-fiscal policy in encouraging pro-environmental behaviours – the development and highlighting of social norms. Our personal behaviours are heavily mediated by observation, social learning, group dynamics and societal expectation. We are influenced by how people around us act and by how we think the people around us think we should act. In other words, people are more likely to adopt recycling as long-term behaviour if they believe that recycling is a social norm which their family, friends, neighbours and colleagues also adhere to. To make social pressures an effective tool to changing waste-disposal habits, it is important to make the compliance highly visible. A key barrier to the uptake of good waste-disposal behaviour is the fact that bad behaviour is so unnoticeable – since waste disposal is necessarily a community issue, individual efforts at waste minimisation largely go unnoticed. One solution here is to make non-adherence socially conspicuous. For example, a ban on burying organic materials in landfill sites in Nova Scotia, Canada, led municipalities throughout the province to introduce schemes to promote household composting. Since household composting is not a particularly visible activity, stickers were provided to those people who were already composting – a surprisingly high 56%. This demonstrated their involvement to the rest of the community and helped highlight the existing social norm. It also signalled community commitment to composting – an important driver of behaviour and one instinctively recognisable to polic-makers in local government. The Surrey Scholar project in Guildford, for example, innovatively played on a sense of community endeavour when it pioneered a system of ‘competitive feedback' between ‘street neighbourhoods', each comprising around 10 houses. Households received feedback slips which told them whether their street was out or underperforming other streets, and comparing the street's own performance at different points during the study. The study found that appealing to people's competitive spirits and making meaningful comparisons was more effective than conventional information-only campaigns. Interestingly, when residents were told that they were beating targets, participation appeared to improve even among individuals who identified themselves as non-recyclers. In the absence of large-scale fiscal penalty options, and since, unlike other pro-environmental behaviours such as ‘green tourism' or buying organic cotton clothes, it's difficult to conceive of a day in which recycling will acquire its own brand of ‘eco chic', it is fortunate that, as these kinds of initiatives demonstrate, there is another way. Making good waste-disposal behaviours an accepted and expected social norm looks to be the most fruitful way for local authorities to meet their targets and play their part in tackling climate change. Jessica Prendergrast is a senior research fellow at the Social Market Foundation and co-author of Creatures Of Habit. Helen Tomlinson is a research assistant at the SMF
