The vast majority of homes around the country have comprehensive recycling systems, that collect a variety of materials, all from the doorstep – a valet service that, in most instances, turns waste to resource with the minimum of user fuss. So why is our household recycling rate in the UK just 44 per cent? Why are some people simply not recycling, and what can be done to change that? In a time when it has never been easier to get a message across thanks to the advent of social media, as well as more traditional means, communication is key. It might not have the glamour of Mad Men, but the route to increased recycling participation is, in many cases, through words. Rachel Gray, Behaviour Change Manager at the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), says there are four general barriers to recycling at home. While the key barrier remains situational – the service itself – the three remaining obstacles all come down to communications: “The others are knowledge, motivation and behaviour. All of those areas can be addressed by communications. You need both a service and communications, and to make a recycling system work you need to consider them as a package.” Launched in 2004 to help local authorities maximise recycling participation, WRAP’s Recycle Now campaign has witnessed a sea change in household recycling. Back then, says Gray, services were still being implemented for the first time and communications were based around explaining why recycling was necessary. Moreover, everything was aimed at one specific audience – “the lady of the household, who organised the kitchen and how things worked there when it came to recycling”. Fast-forward to 2015 and a ‘comprehensive refresh’ of the campaign has seen WRAP go back to the drawing board, returning with a different point of attack. Though those four barriers are still prevalent, recycling, Gray says, is now a “social norm” and involves the whole household “with different roles, recycling from different areas in the house from different activities”. WRAP research suggests that people know that recycling is the thing to do, but with constant change in local systems, and increased transience moving people between differing collection schemes, they need constantly-stressed guidance to help them keep up with the ‘dynamic recycling world’. As far as target audiences are concerned, WRAP has identified four groups of people at different stages of the recycling learning curve. Gray explains: “Roughly a quarter of people are doing everything fantastically and roughly a quarter of people are largely disengaged. Then you’ve got the other half of people in the middle. “These are split into those who are potentially over-cautious, not sure whether they should recycle [a certain material] or put it in the rubbish bin, and those who are saying, ‘Well, I’m not sure, but I’ll put it in the recycling anyway.’” So WRAP has decided to focus on that middle 50 per cent, where the issue is not the why but the how, with specific campaigns highlighting which materials can be recycled, and what items from less traditionally-covered areas of the home can be included. Will there be a point, though, when the willing have been given all the tools possible, and it’s time to move on to the reticent? In the long-term, says Gray, it will be essential, but with resources stretched, focusing on the engaged simply provides better return on investment than going after the harder-to-reach fruit. There are certainly some groups that must be engaged if the UK’s recycling rate is going to increase, most notably those in urban areas, where situational barriers are rife. A WRAP study on barriers to recycling at home concluded that around a quarter of households in the UK are flats, which are ‘often associated with poor recycling performance; capture is low and contamination can be high’. Providing an accessible recycling system should be the top priority for local authorities operating in these areas, says Sarahjane Widdowson, Principal Consultant at Ricardo-AEA, but then it’s all about finding a ‘hook’ for residents. “Communities are by their nature groups of similar people and housing stock. They will often have similar outlooks and concerns. This can be utilised through community outreach, peer pressure and support”, she says. “Engaging with community leaders and influencers, and allowing the communities to spread the messages through their own networks are proven to help deliver enhanced recycling services and performance.” This is an example of looking at each issue separately, and engineering bespoke approaches suited to the desired response, something Widdowson says is essential to a successful campaign: “It’s essential that the campaign is researched and planned effectively before starting”, she says. “This includes really understanding what the challenge is that needs to be solved (e.g. increased recycling tonnage, reduced contamination, improved capture rates) and then what budget and resources are realistically available to deliver it. “Clarity is key: clarity about the output desired, the scale of budget available, the target group, about the messages to be used and about how to measure impact.” Once a council recycling team has established those targets, it’s time to devise a strategy: popular scientific theory suggests that human motivation is split into three goals that fight each other on every decision. Hedonic goals make us want to live a pleasurable life with reduced effort. Gain goals prioritise personal resources – money, time or status – and making sure we have as much as we can. Finally, normative goals, the angel on the shoulder, drive us to do the right thing and behave appropriately. It’s this third type of motivation that environmental behaviour change campaigns seek to ignite in us, and that WRAP suggests has already been sparked in the majority of UK residents. But it’s often not as easy as that, as Professor Linda Steg, from the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen, explains: “Many choices have conflicting consequences for all these goals. Recycling is the appropriate thing to do, so would meet your normative goals, but it might be a hassle and so trespass on your hedonic goals. So then it depends on the strength of the goals, and the strength of the goal first depends on your values: what do you find most important to strive for in your life?” Knowledge of the problem, it seems, is rarely enough. Many UK residents will be well aware that they can recycle some of the things they still put in the bin, and that doing so would be better for the world, but that doesn’t mean they do it. To change this behaviour, communications campaigns have to use the other two goals to sweeten the deal, which means making recycling either profitable or pleasurable. Incentive schemes have been tried to get people to think with their pockets, and have been backed by Defra’s Household Reward and Recognition Fund and the Department for Communities and Local Government under Eric Pickles, but research carried out by Eunomia suggests that they rarely present value for money and might on occasion even encourage the production of more waste. In any case, says Steg, financial accompaniments to environmental actions rarely result in lasting change if not accompanied with strong communications. She points to a study in the Netherlands where participants were given financial rewards for driving in environmentally-friendly ways. Results revealed that driving improved when the scheme was in place, but as soon as the incentives were taken away, that improvement vanished. This, she says, was because the change prioritised the gain rather than using it to supplement the normative aspect. Addressing hedonic goals may seem a bit trickier. If people don’t get a kick out of helping the environment when they’re recycling, then how exactly are you going to get them to feel good about it? These goals, however, are not necessarily about being selfish. Environmental charity Hubbub has been testing behaviour change initiatives in a variety of sectors in the last couple of years, and though it has yet to touch on recycling in the home, has found one driver that is particularly important to getting people to act environmentally – community. “If you can create a sense of community or agency around an action it’s really important”, says Trewin Restorick, Hubbub’s founder. “Many issues feel too large for individuals to address, but if they feel confident that they are not alone, they are more likely to act. There’s also the importance of changing social norms. People are more likely to act if they see others doing similar things as this becomes the socially-accepted way to behave.” Gray agrees: “What people want to know is: ‘How might that locally benefit me or my community?’ So we have focused on making people feel good about doing these things for their children or their area.” Some schemes concentrate instead on avoiding negative feelings. The ‘Right stuff. Right bin’ pilot campaign held by Rochdale Council in 2013 played on the desire not to be the odd one out, having recycling crews attaching labels to bins either declaring them correctly used with a bright green tag or highlighting errors with a bold red ‘Wrong stuff. Wrong bin’ tag. Officers then went through these bins with residents to show them where they’d gone wrong. Results were overwhelmingly positive, with contamination in the area’s co-mingled bins falling by 61 per cent and the recycling rate increasing by almost half. With the two-month pilot also saving the council an estimated £22,420, the scheme was extended to neighbouring districts across Greater Manchester. Scientific theory on whether it’s better to build on positive emotions or warn of negative ones is split, says Steg. “The most prominent theories indicate that you can better stress positive things, because then people also know what they should do”, she explains. “But there is also a very prominent phenomenon called ‘loss aversion’, which means that losses loom larger than gains. “Losses are valued as being more important than gains, so if you emphasise what can be lost if you don’t engage in behaviour, it might be more effective.” It might be easier to spread fear about world-shattering issues like climate change than a PET bottle ending up in the wrong bin, but with the provision of natural resources dwindling and cuts seeing libraries and hospitals close far too frequently, the cost of unnecessarily sending recyclable material to expensive landfills can be clearly communicated. Of course, barriers exist for local authorities as well as residents, and with most experiencing significant cuts, the communications budget – considered by some to be non-essential – is often the first to go. This can make designing a campaign tricky, with no money for extensive market research. But Widdowson suggests other methods can be used to decide what to target, including existing council-wide satisfaction surveys and monitoring trends in complaints and enquiries. Austerity could even, at a push, present an opportunity to appeal to that sense of community noted as a driver for change. Wandsworth Borough Council, for example, highlighted to residents the fact that over 7,500 tonnes of paper are put into council bins every year. If it was recycled, it said, the council could save some £900,000 a year, and spend it on other services. If residents aren’t fussed about the earth’s resources, they might spare a thought for their local swimming pool. But Widdowson emphasises that having a plan of attack is key: “If you don’t have some base data on which to target your messages, then there is a high chance of failure – because your campaign doesn’t ‘work’ for the audience who need to change, or because the campaign media do not adequately reach the groups who need to be influenced. Data and knowledge are power."