Recycling Campaigns: Factors Affecting Success And Failures

Recycling campaigns Factors affecting the success and failures of them Antonis Mavropoulos ISWA STC Chair CEO EPEM SA

Questions to discuss • How can we change human behavior in order to maximize recycling? • Why informal recycling seems to be more effective? • What are the relations between recycling performance, life style and living conditions? • How those relations may be utilized to recycling campaigns? • Assumption: logistics and systems are fine (although they are not…)

Contents 1. Human evolution and recycling barriers 2. Recycling and daily practices – 2.1 Situational conditions – 2.2 Social – environmental values – 2.3 Behavioral attitudes 3. Conclusions

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Q1: What is the effectiveness of recycling campaigns? 1. 2. 3. 4.

High Medium Poor We do not know exactly

1. Human evolution and recycling barriers •

Too much money, effort and time for recycling campaigns - Results: not durable, not long-term, not general recycling behavior

• Is there any kind of barrier to our brain for long-term results? Is there any structural problem to our personality that renders a more general recycling behavior?

Evolutionary psychology • Natural selection is the PERSONALITY origin of many decision• Human typical making rules that define psychological human behavior mechanism • DNA impact of survival • Our behavior adventure depends both in • Thoughts, feeling, situation / behavioral patterns conditions and this reproduced successfully for mechanism too millions of generations

Present Focus Brain • Our ancestors: life or death every moment (nutrition, shelter - safety, heat) • Those who failed to behave like that simply did not reproduce themselves • How Long was Long-term: reproduction, influence coalitions • We just started thinking long-term issues like environment and climate change

The results are…

• Why we do not recycle since we know the risk for our planet? • Because the effects of non-recycling are out of our temporal and spatial scale. In temporal terms, those effects extend at hundreds of years and affect future generations • In spatial terms, the results of nonrecycling are obvious to resources utilization rates and the landfills’ capacity which are both many miles away • Because our brain is present-centered designed

• Imagine: everyone has his own landfill in his backyard. • How easily would you produce waste? • How fanatic would you be to reuse and recycle materials? • Remember: reuse and repair patterns of our grandpas and grandmas before single – use products and SWM systems create the easiness to throw away

The Present Focus Brain comes for NIMBY as well!

So what to do? • Information campaigns are not enough to create changes in human behavior • Create reasoning for recycling in our temporal and spatial scale • Replace thousands of generations with millions of social interactions: create social pressure for long-term thinking to fight evolutionary inertia • We have to reconsider how we promote recycling thinking out of the box to have sustainable results

Q2: How many of you are in favor of recycling?

Q3: How many of you are active recyclers on a daily basis?

2. Recycling and daily practice • 100% favor recycling – max 50% do recycle. Why? • Fundamental misunderstanding: Behavioral Change does not count just to rationalization • If it was we should not have so many heart attacks since we know the causes!!! • Knowledge is necessary but not capable to produce changes to behavior

How environmental action is framed in terms of daily practice and groups? Are there conditions that favor an environmental lifestyle? What is the effects of our neighbors and neighborhood?

Let’s frame it Social – environmental values

Situational conditions

Behavior attitudes

Framework to understand recycling behavior of individuals

2.1 Situational conditions Q4: Who recycles more? • Full recyclers are mainly retired and relatively richer on average • Non recyclers are mainly “young without children – families with children – middle aged without children” • Property plays a role as well and type of flat (with or without terrace, space limit)

The importance of architecture Where do we have more recycling rates and participation?

Square type

Linear streets

Recycling & participation is more at square type of 5-14 houses Why? • Visibility and proximity create social interaction • The action of the neighbor plays a role • In big squares there are no special differences with linear streets

Small linear streets are better than big ones • Again proximity and visibility create interaction • Kind of human scale • Crossroads

Recycling seems to be done in clusters of households • Up to 15 contiguous households create a cluster of uniform behavior regarding recycling – in this case there must be one to start the change • Squares create more easily clusters – use them as a starting point for initiatives that will provide visible action (the importance of collection scheme!)

Social Impact of Recyclers = = Actions x Visibility x Proximity

2.2 Social-environmental values • Recycling performance match with purchasing habits • Recyclers buy things: – Made from recycled in stead of virgin materials – More durable – With less packaging

• Recyclers tend to repair if it is possible • The more personal recycling the more change in consumption patterns and viceversa

Profile of full and non-recyclers • Holistic approach for environment – not sectored • Committed recyclers believe in Biosphere instead of Unlimited Growth, in Spaceship Earth instead of anthropocentrism – they create lifestyle patterns • Non-recyclers believe that there are no limits to growth and that technology will solve all environmental problems – they create lifestyle patterns

What do they mostly recycle? • Global trend 1: every person who recycle start from paper and cardboard and recycles much more of those materials comparing to others • Global trend 2: cans and glass recycling is usually more difficult and less intent comparing with paper and plastics

Why do they recycle paper so much? • • • •

Long history No preparation Easy storage Global icon – deforestation

Why cans are not recycled so much? • Cans are being waste during busy periods like cooking • Need for rinsing • Need for storage • Not directly linked with “benefits”

2.3 Behavioral attitudes • The more they are
Recycling is more possible • • • • • • • •

Social norms - respect Self - Motivation Response efficacy Self- efficacy Threat feeling Personal satisfaction Altruism Citizenship

3. Conclusions • Although production and consumption patterns are the key – elements that have to be radically changed, recycling has a very important role in order to relief the global waste problem • In terms of personal behavior, the human personality has a built –in barrier for recycling due to species characteristic understanding of temporal scale. Our brain is too much present – focus in order to understand and act according long-term impacts.

• Recycling campaigns usually fail because : – They tend to ignore that messages should be directed to affect people in their human spatial and temporal scale – They tend to ignore that information and rationalization are not enough to change human behavior

• Recycling behavior is framed by situational conditions, social- environmental values and personal attitudes. • The later determines the intention to recycle while the first the possibility to actually contribute

• Recycling activities should be carefully designed according local conditions and situation, taking into account socialdemographic characteristics, architecture, finding the starting point and creating clusters • For all those reasons there is not a global solution for successful recycling • Instead there is an ocean of bad or inappropriate solutions with some islands of successful ones

LET’S FIND THEM WITH ISWA (WWW.ISWA.ORG )

I will be happy to share ideas…

http://mavropoulos.blogspot.com/ [email protected]