Visual Prompts or Volunteer Models: An Experiment in Recycling

Zi Lin,Xiao Wang,Chang Li,Micheil Gordon,Marie Harder

doi:10.3390/su8050458

Abstract

Successful long-term programs for urban residential food waste sorting are very rare, despite the established urgent need for them in cities for waste reduction, pollution reduction and circular resource economy reasons. This study meets recent calls to bridge policy makers and academics, and calls for more thorough analysis of operational work in terms of behavioral determinants, to move the fields on. It takes a key operational element of a recently reported successful food waste sorting program—manning of the new bins by volunteers—and considers the behavioral determinants involved in order to design a more scalable and cheaper alternative—the use of brightly colored covers with flower designs on three sides of the bin. The two interventions were tested in a medium-scale, real-life experimental set-up that showed that they had statistically similar results: high effective capture rates of 32%–34%, with low contamination rates. The success, low cost and simple implementation of the latter suggests it should be considered for large-scale use. Candidate behavioral determinants are prompts, emotion and knowledge for the yellow bin intervention, and for the volunteer intervention they are additionally social influence, modeling, role clarification, and moderators of messenger type and interpersonal or tailored messaging.

Highlights

Waste is a problem worldwide, and is especially acute in urban areas where land is less available for large scale waste processing in landfills or incinerators
The weights of the food waste and non-food waste found in each of recycling and residual waste are given in Table 3 below, for the baseline measurements taken on the fifth day after the launch and for the two measurements on the 31st and 32nd days
This study set out to design an effective and scalable food waste sorting program element to replace a more costly one previously found to be key to success in a recently reported program [16]. This was done by considering the potential behavioral determinants that could be associated with that key element—the use of volunteers to stand beside bins to interact with residents—and thence to design an alternative operational intervention that could be tested alongside it in an experimental set up

Summary

Introduction

Waste is a problem worldwide, and is especially acute in urban areas where land is less available for large scale waste processing in landfills or incinerators. Some components such as organic waste could be used to combat other problems: for example if used to replace some fossil fuels with biogas, or to produce soil conditioners that may reduce the need for artificial fertilizers and can increase carbon content held in soils. Successful citywide recycling of residential waste must start with successful segregation at source—the residents need to segregate or sort their waste [1] This practice is well established in many countries for more valuable recyclable material streams such as plastic bottles, paper, metal cans, clean paper and cardboard, segregation in high-density urban areas with high-rise apartments is generally significantly less successful. Effective approaches for cities and multiple-occupancy housing are still in early development and rare

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Conclusion