If you had asked me, at the tender age of five, to tell you what the 3Rs were (as a pupil at an environmentally-progressive Chicago primary school who had not gotten to grips with arithmetic), I would have responded – automatically, without missing a beat – “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” I may even have burst into song. If you had then asked me what I did in relation to the 3Rs, I would have said, “I go to the bottle bank and hear the glass go ‘clink, clink, clink’”, or something to that effect. But, if you had asked me what I did to reduce waste, I would have stared at you blankly. And, if you had pressed on, told me I was naughty and really ought to do something about my overall waste generation, I may well have kicked you in the shins and run away crying in confusion.

Twenty-five years into the resource efficiency movement and many people, if asked the same questions, would offer comparable responses (minus the shin kicking, perhaps). Most responsible citizens can easily identify their recycling activities, but find attributing concrete actions to the more abstract notion of ‘reduce’ and, to a certain extent, ‘reuse’, much more difficult and confusing. I’d wager that the results from my retrospective survey of one would repeat themselves time and again across all demographics and age groups. Indeed, waste statistics show how much more successful we’ve been at getting people to act on the third aspect of the waste hierarchy than the first: recycling has been increasing year on year since 1983, when Defra records began, but it is only since 2006/07 that any reductions in total waste arisings have occurred, and much of that has been attributed to the financial downturn.

‘Recycle’ is clearly the easiest of the 3Rs for people to grasp and, in fact, this is quite understandable: despite being yoked together for the past 30-odd years in a catchy alliterative phrase, psychologically speaking, ‘reduce’ and ‘recycle’ are vastly different concepts, and the former is much more complicated.

In our society, recycling is a simple activity governed by a clear set of rules and supported by a complex infrastructure that makes things incredibly easy for your average consumer: for the most part, all a recycler has to do is place his properly cleaned and (sometimes) sorted material at the kerbside and he can feel as though he’s done his bit and the council will take care of the rest. What’s more, recycling is often carried out in public and so can be regarded as a social norm. The fact that you can see all your neighbours’ properly cleaned and sorted recyclables lined up on the kerbside reinforces the idea that recycling is the ‘done’ thing.

Waste reduction, on the other hand, is much more complex; or, as Paul Phillips, Professor in Waste Management at the University of Northampton, puts it: recycling and waste minimisation “are not even in the same ballpark”. Unlike recycling, reduction is a largely abstract notion, and behaviours that relate to it are usually practised in private and are – for the most part – unsupported by any infrastructure or clear rules. More significantly, reduction isn’t a single behaviour, but many, often unrelated actions.

Professor Peter Tucker of the University of the West of Scotland has broadly classified waste minimisation into five categories: actions at the point of purchase (avoiding over-packaging, buying in bulk, buying loose produce); buying long-life products; valorisation of unwanted goods (donating or selling used items); minimising the purchase of new resources (through mending, hiring, sharing or buying secondhand); and reuse. (Though reuse is a separate component of the waste hierarchy, reusing items contributes to reduction – by reusing your shopping bags, for example, you reduce the need for new bags from virgin sources. The confusion mounts.)

Most of these behaviours are not widely practised by the general populace: donating and selling items is the most popular, while avoiding overpackaged goods is the least practised action, according to a study by Professor Tucker. Significantly, the different reduction behaviours often do not interact or influence each other; as Tucker notes: “Waste prevention behaviours are generally exhibited in degrees, being carried out some of the time rather than all of the time, or carried out for some activities but not for others, or just restricted to selected product categories.” Indeed, someone who buys long-life bulbs won’t necessarily reuse glass jars, just as someone who repairs damaged electrical goods won’t necessarily buy wine in lightweighted bottles, for example.

What’s more, for the most part, ‘recycling’ and ‘reduction’ appear to be psychologically unrelated for most people. As Professor Phillips explains, the motivations behind the behaviours are vastly different: “’Concern for the environment’ is fantastically strong in minimisation, but not in recycling. You’ve got things like ‘concern for society’, which is powerful in prevention, but not in recycling. There’s a whole gamut of components to do with society, wellbeing, happiness, health, which come into minimisation, which don’t come into recycling. They just don’t appear.” Recycling is predominantly normative it seems, while reduction can be motivated by any number of different concerns.

Some studies have shown that recycling activities can actually have a negative effect on reduction behaviours. According to the Ipsos Mori report ‘Public Attitudes Towards Recycling and Waste Management’: ‘An adverse side effect of the success of the “recycling good; landfill bad” message appears to be a negative impact on waste minimisation; qualitative research suggests that people do not feel it is necessary to reduce packaging if they are able to readily recycle. This presents a challenge to developing a more detailed understanding of the waste management “hierarchy”.’ So, while recycling can be a ‘token gesture’ to alleviate environmental guilt in general (“Yes, I flew to America this year, but I always recycle my plastic bottles”), it seems it can absolve people entirely of their primary duty to reduce (“So long as I can recycle these plastic water bottles, I see no reason why I shouldn’t buy 10 of them a week”).

Refocusing communications to highlight the need to prevent waste rather than merely recycle it could be a bit tricky, though. As Professor Phillips explains: “I think this is clearly a knowledge issue. You see, if you were told that what you ought to do is recycle and you do it, the good citizen will have assured themselves, by expert opinion, that they are doing all that’s required. Now, if you then say to them, ‘Well, what about buying things like lightweight containers?’, they’ll look at you and say, ‘Well, hang on. My local authority has been telling us for 10 years that all we must do is put things in the blue box!’ And this knowledge deficit means that when people are informed that it is much better to prevent than recycle, they go ape. They think that they’ve been swindled, that the council’s been lying through their teeth. Typical. There’s been a collusion.” People might go ape with a bit more decorum than a five-year-old kicking shins, but nonetheless, ape most people would go…

So, what’s to be done? Phillips suggests we might want to ‘gloss over’ the change in direction and move on to a completely different approach. Rather than pointing out that the highly successful recycling message was only part of the story, we should market waste prevention activities in a broader environmental light: “Joe average doesn’t see waste, he sees the environment… So, I think what we do is we see prevention as many activities which lead to reduced impact on the planet – so, you save money, you feel good, you save the planet.” Positive messaging, he says, is key.

Another option, what Phillips refers to as ‘perfect prevention’ and others have called ‘prevention by stealth’ is to get industry to prevent waste on consumers’ behalves. This means initiatives like the Courtauld Commitment, of course, whereby retailers and producers have volunteered to reduce packaging waste. So, the idea is, consumers can just go on buying what they buy and the amount of waste they produce (in this instance, at least from packaging) will decrease year on year. Some might argue that a voluntary agreement such as this will never produce the levels of reduction we need to see (despite the ‘commitment’, you don’t see supermarkets rushing out to reintroduce refillable containers, do you?), but it is currently the main driver for packaging waste reduction. (And remember, reducing waste at the point of purchase is the prevention activity that most people are least likely to engage in; often they see packaging waste prevention as someone else’s responsibility or don’t think of themselves as wilfully trying to create packaging waste.)

One pioneering group that launched a campaign trying to get people to prevent packaging waste themselves is the Devon Authorities Recycling Partnership, which a couple of years ago ran ads urging people to opt for lightly-packaged items when possible. While Liz Poulter, Senior Waste Manager, says the campaign was, at the time, ‘really successful’, she admits: “Packaging has now become quite controversial because there are a lot of conflicting messages around. Some packaging is actually quite vital, for instance to prolong the life of fruit and vegetables… So you can only really be effective at communicating the packaging issue in a one-to-one situation or in quite a lot of detail.”

For its part, Devon is in the process of refocusing its waste communications away from the waste hierarchy, to a more holistic approach. In accordance with the waste psychologists (and, indeed, the waste statistics), Poulter asserts: “The problem is that ‘reduce’ and ‘reuse’ don’t mean anything to people. So, we’re changing the focus completely, to talk to consumers in a way that’s actually meaningful and a bit more entertaining.” Rather than sending out the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ message (or at least a ‘recycle, recycle, recycle’ version), the likes of which authorities have used over the past 15 years to get most people on board with recycling, Devon will be breaking down messages to explain to people what they can do in different aspects of their day-to-day lives – ‘at home’, ‘at work’, ‘at school’, ‘in the garden’, ‘savvy shopping’, and so on. (Incidentally, the promotion of ‘savvy shopping’ is a core component of the Welsh Assembly Government’s approach to halving overall waste generation by 2050.)

Poulter suggests that offering people additional benefits to reduction behaviours is vital to engaging them – clothes swap parties are ‘brilliant social activities’, for example, and cutting back on food waste saves money. Indeed, many councils have been highly successful with Love Food Hate Waste campaigns for just this reason.

Inevitably, though, it is much easier to encourage people to reduce certain types of waste: of course people don’t want to throw away consumable items at their own expense, and of course people don’t want to deal with the hassle of mountains of junk mail, but ask them to cut back on their fashion-enhancing shoe collection or their status-enhancing gadgets, and they won’t necessarily be so responsive. Indeed, Poulter points to research that Devon has conducted with 18-24 year olds that indicates: “That age group, particularly the males, are highly motivated by possessions and wealth, it seems.” In a consumption-driven society that values material possessions as much as ours does, can we ever make the minimisation message truly resonate?

Well, Poulter provides a glimmer hope when she notes that Devon’s research showed the women in the 18-24 age group tend to do most of the purchasing, and “they have a slightly different agenda. They are more interested in families and health and so you need to find additional benefits to get them to reduce”. Phillips points to another potential ray of sunshine when he notes that there is actually a growing subsection of society that increasingly rejects the ‘stuff makes you happy’ narrative – Transition Towns and Eco Towns are not ubiquitous yet, but at least they’re on the rise, and the government’s first seven Zero Waste Places achieved results at very little cost. (If only the new government would reinstate funding for the project…)

At this juncture, we no longer need a catchy mantra that any old five-year-old can repeat without truly comprehending – what we need is more of a complete cultural shift. No easy task, to be sure, but now that we know it (and a bit more about what makes people tick), we can at least get to work sending out the right messages.