Promoting recycling behaviours through convenience: Focus on the relatives, not the absolute

Abstract

BackgroundConvenience is often reported as an important factor for encouraging people to recycle; to dispose recyclables into a recycling bin. Yet, improvements to the convenience of disposing recyclables have yielded limited benefits in practice. Some scholars have speculated that the persistent focus on improving the absolute convenience of recycling without due consideration of how convenient recycling has become relative to using a trash bin, might underlie this research-practice divide. ObjectiveThis study seeks to empirically examine whether improvements to the relative convenience of recycling—from a scenario where recycling is relatively less convenient to a scenario both waste disposal options are equally convenient to a scenario where recycling is relatively more convenient—can encourage more recycling behaviours. MethodThree pre-registered, between-subjects experiments that varies the relative convenience of recycling were conducted (N = 811). ResultsAcross all three studies, participants were most likely to recycle when disposing recyclables into a recycling bin was as convenient as using a trash bin. Making recycling more convenient than using a trash bin yielded mixed results; it encouraged more (Study 1) or less (Study 3) recycling compared to situations where both waste disposal options are equally accessible. ConclusionContrary to common intuition that convenience and recycling share a positive, linear relationship, this study shows that convenience may best (consistently, effectively) encourage recycling when the option to dispose recyclables is as convenient as disposing litter into a trash bin. Beyond this point of “equal convenience”, further efforts to make recycling more convenient may not encourage more recycling practices and could potentially backfire by reverting participants’ recycling tendencies to pre-intervention levels.