Opportunities to recycle our waste are ubiquitous. We are constantly encouraged to avoid sending our waste to landfill by placing it in recycling receptacles so that it can be reincarnated into new and useful products. Breweries make beer out of wasted bread, and outdoor clothing companies make fleece jackets out of discarded plastic bottles.
However, does being made aware of these potential “good homes” for our waste risk us becoming less careful about creating unnecessary waste? One of the authors (Tim) noticed that he started feeling less bad about throwing away perfectly good food when his local government authority introduced a new curbside food waste collection scheme that transformed organic waste into biofuel to power the local bus. We wondered if this might apply to other situations too. Might knowing recycled plastic bottles can be recycled into jackets make you reach for the bottled water instead of just having a glass of tap water?
The Fate Of Cookies
We explored these questions with Dutch students, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. In our first experiment, participants were asked to taste cookies while watching a short movie. They could either dispose of the leftover cookies in the bin provided in their cubicle, or could take them up to a communal kitchen area on the top floor of the building (where they could be eaten by hungry postgraduate students in offices nearby).
Crucially, we changed up the bin provided in the cubicle so that some participants had a black bin that contained general waste, some had a green bin that contained biodegradable waste, and some had a green bin that contained biodegradable waste that would be turned into biofuel to power the local buses in a new waste recycling project. Just as we had suspected, people were nearly twice as likely to discard edible food when they were told that their biodegradable waste would be turned into biofuel (74.5%) than when presented with either the black bin (39.2%) or the green bin (42.0%).
Next, we wanted to see why exactly the biofuel bus bin made so many more people throw away their leftover cookies. We asked a new set of participants to imagine that they had participated in a taste test experiment just like the one described above, with the same three bins. Some participants were told to imagine that they had thrown their cookies in the bin, whereas others were told to imagine they had taken the leftovers up to the top floor of the building for others to eat.
We simply asked these participants to tell us how good they would feel about themselves for making their decision (that is, how much ‘warm glow’ they would feel). When their scenarios involved both the landfill bin and the regular organic waste bin, participants who imagined having preserved the food for others reported higher warm glow than those who had imagined throwing it away.
However, when their scenario involved the fancy new biofuel recycling scheme, those who imagined having saved the food for others to eat actually reported lower warm glow than those who imagined having thrown it in the biofuel bin! In line with our original concerns, it seemed that becoming aware of a ‘good home’ for one’s potential waste really could convince people that throwing stuff away might be morally better than not creating the waste in the first place.
Next, Non-Alcoholic Beverages
In our final experiment, we invited participants to taste a new non-alcoholic beverage. We gave them the choice of tasting the beverage either out of a standard reusable glass tumbler or a single-use plastic bottle that was to be disposed of in the bin provided. The bin was either a regular black landfill bin, or a recycling bin for the company “Waste2Wear,” which was said to recycle plastic bottles into new pieces of clothing.
In line with our first two studies, people were more likely to choose the single-use plastic bottle over the (more sustainable) re-useable glass tumbler when the plastic could be ‘donated’ to the Waste2Wear recycling bin, compared to being put in a landfill bin. Participants with the Waste2Wear bin also had a greater feeling of warm glow about using the plastic bottle.
Is it therefore a bad thing for government authorities and private companies to try to take our waste and turn it into something useful? Not at all. It is certainly much better for waste to be diverted from landfill, and arguably even better to make it into useful products for which there is a market.
However, avoiding waste in the first place is almost always environmentally preferable to using energy to recycle it into something else. Therefore, authorities and companies may be well advised to avoid the current (admittedly intuitive) practice of making people aware of “good outcomes” for their waste, or at least be aware that increases in wasteful behavior could be a potentially negative side effect.
For Further Reading
van Doorn, J., & Kurz, T. (2021). The warm glow of recycling can make us more wasteful. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 77, 101672. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101672
Jenny van Doorn is Professor in Services Marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She researches (un)sustainable consumer behaviour, food waste, and the use of robots in the service frontline.
Tim Kurz is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology in the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia. He researches the ways in which processes of morality and social identity influence people’s propensity to engage in environmentally sustainable (and other forms of pro-social) behavior.
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