Thought-Provoking Thursday: Not Recycling? Blame Your Brain.
The cost of not recycling recyclable materials can be steep: one recent study revealed that California alone spends $500 million per year to keep plastic bottles and food wrappers off the streets and out of waterways. Yet, despite the millions of tons of trash Americans produce each year, the EPA estimates that only 35 percent of it is actually recycled. Why are we staying away from the little blue bins? According to a new study, we can blame our brains.
In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, authors Remi Trudel and Jennifer Argo reveal that we subconsciously assess recyclable items based on their usefulness, and if we think a recyclable item is not useful (like a tiny piece of paper or an overly-dented aluminum can), we will toss it in the trash.
“I think what happens is unconsciously we have these schemas that says recyclables are useful and what isn’t useful is trash. The further something moves from its original shape… you become more likely to trash it,” Trudel explained in a recent phone interview.
To test their theory, Trudel and Argo put participants through a series of experiments in which they were divided into groups and told they were to evaluate a pair of scissors. One group was to just look at the scissors next to an 8.5” by 11” sheet of paper, while the other group was to cut the paper into pieces. On their way out the door, the participants could either choose to recycle their paper or trash it. In one version of this test, 82 percent of the participants who had left the paper intact chose to recycle it — compared to 44 percent of recyclers amongst the group that had cut the paper into pieces.
“Since we were born, we have little pieces of paper we’ve thrown out, and if we want something to be private we tore it up before we threw it out,” Trudel said. “In our minds, if something becomes distorted it becomes less useful and more like garbage.”
In an interesting twist, Trudel and Argo found that when they asked participants to list the uses for small pieces of paper, 67.6 percent recycled the small pieces — compared to just 36.8 percent of participants in the control group (who had been asked to list their favorite TV shows).
“I honestly thought it was all about size. I didn’t think it was about usefulness. I thought at one point if something gets too small, it’s not worth the effort [to recycle] — and that that was the explanation,” Trudel said. However, given these findings — that it’s more about the perceived usefulness of a recyclable object rather than its size — he and his team are now designing a different experiment at Boston University (where he works) in which they plan to test the effectiveness of a series of posters that serve as recycling PSAs, complete with fun facts about how exactly recycling can translate to economic and environmental good.
In the meantime, however, he said that he hopes his current findings help people to be more mindful of their recycling behavior, because that mindfulness can lead to behavior change.
“While it might be useless from an objective way that people would [normally] use it, it’s not useless as a recyclable object,” he said. “I don’t throw away small pieces of paper anymore. Now I’m aware of it. But I used to.”
