Participate… or contaminate?

This year’s Recycle Week is, for the first time in a long time, focusing on contamination.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s simply putting stuff into the recycling that doesn’t belong there – the materials and items that your council cannot process for recycling, for various reasons. And if there’s too much of it, contamination can mean that truckloads of recycling get thrown into landfill or incinerated instead of being turned into new stuff. All of which is bad for carbon management, bad for the climate, and bad for the responsible stewardship of our finite planetary resources.

The Recycle Week campaign has some compelling, very straightforward and timely messaging about why it’s important only to put the right things into the recycling (and what some of the ‘wrong’ things are), and what difference your recycling can make if you get it right. But in the past five or six years we here at ReLondon, through our London Recycles campaign, have spent a significant proportion of our (also finite) resources focusing on getting people motivated and equipped to get recycling in the first place, rather than telling them what they can’t put in their recycling box, bag or bin. We’ve focused on participation – not contamination.

This has behavioural consequences.

We’ve recently completed the first year of a two-year campaign called ‘Be that person’, designed to motivate younger Londoners to recycle as part of their efforts to help tackle the climate crisis; and it’s had some great results. 89% of those who have seen the campaign say that they’re now recycling more than they were six months ago, compared to only 59% of those who haven’t seen the campaign, an impact which we’re obviously delighted about.

But the flipside of this has been that, when we asked those same people how and where they’d disposed of a wide range of materials the last time they’d had to get rid of them at home, we found that those who had seen the campaign were also contaminating quite a bit more than those who hadn’t. For instance, 51% of the 18-44 year olds we surveyed who had seen the campaign told us that they were putting the plastic film lids that peel off the top of food trays into their recycling, compared to only 31% of those who had NOT seen the campaign. And those plastic film lids are definitely not collected by most, if any, councils in London for recycling.

So the question is, how do we get people motivated to recycle BUT only the right things? Can we tackle participation and contamination all in one campaign? We’re pretty certain you can’t. One of our mantras here at ReLondon when designing and implementing behaviour change communications is “one behaviour, one audience at a time” – and those behaviours are not broad, sweeping ones like “eat healthily” or “recycle correctly” – they are smaller, tangible, comprehensible ones like “do meat-free Monday this week” or “rinse out your food cans before putting them in the recycling”.

So when you’re running a campaign encouraging people to recycle, it’s nigh on impossible to simultaneously educate them not to recycle some of the stuff that can’t be dealt with by their council. It can be confusing, demotivating and counter-productive to tell people both to recycle and not to recycle at the same time: it’s too many messages (and micro-behaviours) at once.

Which is why we’re so pleased that WRAP’s Recycle Now campaign is tackling contamination during Recycle Week this year: it’s vital messaging that is welcomed by our London borough partners in particular, and it means that our London Recycles campaign can – for now, at least – concentrate on getting people motivated and in the game with our ‘Be that person’ campaign.

Written by Ali Moore , Head of communications and behaviour change, ReLondon