Nudging for Good: How to Improve Recycling Using Behavioural Insights
When encouraging individual actions in sustainability, recycling is one of the more prominent behaviours that comes to mind, but it is also fraught with doubt and uncertainty.
Even amongst the environmentally-conscious, people are often sceptical about whether items placed in recycling bins eventually get recycled, and whether efforts in recycling actually amount to anything at all. Some also question if we should focus more on reducing than recycling.
The answers to the questions above are actually fairly simple. Recycling alone may not be much, but it is a systematic way to inculcate a sustainable lifestyle, which is key to transforming the culture of our society.
Choosing between “reducing” and “recycling” is also a false dichotomy, because it is possible to do both! Besides, most people aren’t able to reduce their consumption to a point where they don’t generate waste at all, so are we really not going to talk about recycling the waste that remains?
At the end of the day, recycling is all about economics. If collected recyclables are of good quality, they become a source of raw materials for downstream products that require them. But if businesses see that the costs involved in processing the recyclables are too high, that’s when recyclables don’t get recycled.
This is where behavioural insights can give a hand — how do we get people to recycle more and provide recyclables of better quality, so that recycling becomes more viable as a business?
Using Behavioural Insights
Previously, I wrote about the UK Behavioural Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit) and how they use the EAST framework to design interventions that can be more successful at changing behaviours. In this article, I will illustrate how the EAST framework can be used to improve recycling behaviour, but if you’re interested to understand more about the framework, feel free to check out my previous article.
Make Recycling Easy
As people who aren’t already recycling may have high inertia in participating, making the behaviour easy is probably the most important principle to focus on in the EAST framework. There are many ways to make recycling easy, and I’ll offer some suggestions below on how to implement a few.
1. Show people how to start a recycling corner
The first step in encouraging people to recycle more is getting them to start a recycling corner at home. A recycling corner will act as a constant reminder to separate recyclables from non-recyclables, and it also means that the recyclables only need to be brought to the recycling bins once in a while, as they can be left to pile until the recycling corner is full.
For those who think that it is difficult to start a recycling corner, show them that it is as simple as using an unwanted bag or box to collect the recyclables; and for those who enjoy a little more fun, the recycling corner can in fact become a creative home decor!
2. Break down information by material type
Recycling systems differ from country to country, and in Singapore, it is not necessary to segregate recyclables by material type as all recyclables go to the materials recovery facilities to be sorted.
Nonetheless, collection of recyclables are still based on specific material types (i.e. paper, plastic, glass, metal), so it helps to break down recycling information by the different material types. After all, when people think about recycling an item, they’ll often ask themselves if the item belongs to a material type that is accepted by the recycling bins, so it’s easier for them when the information is broken down!
3. Focus on sharing actionable information
Preparation is often required when recycling items, but not everyone is aware of the necessary steps. This leads to recycling contamination which may not necessarily be due to inconsiderate behaviour, but could be through the ignorance of people who genuinely want to participate in recycling.
Hence, instead of sharing information like how many Olympic-size swimming pools can plastic waste fill (which no one will ever remember), or generically saying that general waste shouldn’t be placed in recycling bins, why not let people know specifically what they need to do before putting an item in the recycling bins? At least that can help to reduce a portion of recycling contamination!
4. Use heuristics, infographics, and flowcharts
Remembering all there is to know about recycling is not easy, and most people won’t bother checking through a long list to find out what can and cannot be recycled. Hence, coming up with simple rules of thumb and infographics that can be understood at a glance can greatly help with the cognitive load.
Psychology studies have shown that fast-and-frugal decision trees (FFTs) are intuitive for people to use, and helps in achieving a high degree of judgment accuracy. A flowchart like the one below is an example of an FFT, which has the potential to be more successful in helping people to recycle correctly!
5. Create a tool to guide people in recycling right
As much as we try to make recycling information easy to understand, there will still be people who won’t pay attention and are only interested in recycling on the fly. For such people, it will be helpful if there was a tool that they could use to check if an item is suitable for recycling, and where they should bring it to.
To help plug this gap, Singapore non-profit “tech for good” collective better.sg has been working on developing a one-stop platform called RecycleGoWhere, that will hopefully guide people in giving unwanted items a second life instead of disposing of them as general waste. More details to follow once the product is ready to launch, but in the meantime, do follow their Instagram page!
Make Recycling Attractive
We’ve covered various ways to make recycling easy, but moving on with the EAST framework, it is also possible to make recycling more attractive to people. In most cases, making something attractive means that people need to be rewarded for performing a desired behaviour, which in the case of recycling, would be offering monetary incentives to people who recycle through a deposit refund scheme.
But perhaps more important than rewarding through monetary incentives, people also want to feel rewarded by knowing that their recycling efforts actually have tangible outcomes. In a recent initiative to recycle old shoes, Singapore sports agency SportSG shared that the donated shoes will be used to construct sports infrastructures such as jogging tracks, fitness corners and playgrounds.
Knowing that their donated shoes will contribute towards building something can give people a sense of accomplishment, and allows them to feel assured that their efforts are worthwhile. Hence, as much as possible, we should be doing this for the recycling of other material types as well!
Make Recycling Social
Social activities are powerful in influencing people to do things that they’ll normally be less willing to do on their own. While it is possible to introduce gamification and get people to compete with one another in who can recycle more, the social aspect I want to talk about is making recycling a social norm.
For a long time, the association of recycling with the identity of an eco-warrior has been too strong. This isn’t helpful for encouraging people who don’t identify with that label to participate in recycling. These people would likely assume that if they aren’t eco-warriors, it isn’t their responsibility to recycle.
To break this association, recycling should be portrayed as being commonplace in every household, and considering whether an item is recyclable or not before disposing of it should be second nature to everyone. By doing so, we will be able to gradually transform recycling into an actual social norm.
Make Recycling Timely
Finally, finding the right moment to broach the topic of recycling can get people to be more receptive, and there is no better time than just before the start of the new year or lunar new year, when people are most likely to do spring-cleaning and will be having a lot of old stuff to get rid of.
Since people will be deciding what to keep and throw, it is possible to make use of this opportunity to get them to consider sorting unwanted items into recyclables and non-recyclables. If people are willing to try sorting at least once, the chances of them recycling again in future will most likely increase!
In Conclusion
Admittedly, recycling is not the easiest behaviour to encourage, especially for individuals who aren’t even convinced in the first place. There is also a lot of information to learn about recycling, which becomes a barrier for people who want to get started, but don’t exactly know how to.
Nevertheless, by applying some behavioural insights to simplify the process of recycling, it is possible to nudge more people to participate in the effort, and hopefully, over time, the act of recycling can grow into an ordinary societal behaviour that is part-and-parcel of our everyday lives.
To learn more about recycling in Singapore, check out the following article by the Singapore Green Plan (https://www.greenplan.gov.sg):
