A large, successful, residential food waste sorting (recycling) program in urban high-density housing was studied to elicit perceptions of the key elements of its success. An embedded mixed-methods approach was used with rigorous quantitative measures of weights and compositions of the waste to confirm the success of the program, combined with in-depth semi-structured interviews of stakeholders to reveal their opinions of the elements key for success. The program produced a 70% food waste capture rate slowly decreasing to 45% over 54 weeks, with <1% contamination. The key elements for success were found to relate to clarification of roles and responsibilities, and the usefulness of a ‘broker’ (here, an NGO) to co-develop new boundaries for stakeholder responsibilities. Residents who acknowledged their responsibility to sort their waste viewed it as civic duty, but first needed to be convinced of the serious intention of the local government to implement the policy. Residents with strong relationships with the local government – e.g. due to greater ongoing interactions – were perceived to perform better. The use of volunteers to demonstrate and interact on a personal level with residents was seen as a key element. The three month period of volunteer involvement was seen as key to good habit formin

In this study we report on a doorstepping intervention which produced a 12.5%, statistically significant,increase in the recycling capture rate. More importantly, we investigate why doorstepping caused theincrease, through focus groups, structured interviews and questionnaires. By analyzing the findings withrespect to a pragmatic set of eleven clusters of determinants of behaviour change, we find that socialnorms and emotion were important, with prompts as a more minor determinant. We can now planfurther doorstepping knowing an emphasis on these is useful. Knowledge, skills, belief of consequences,belief of capability, action planning, role clarification, feedback, and motivation were determinant clusters found not to be important in this case.\ud \ud Recycling behaviour change interventions often do not generally produce transferable learning becausethey are usually presented as case studies and not broken down into key elements. Our analytica lapproach of breaking down a poorly defined activity - doorstepping - into elements which influencedifferent clusters of determinants, and then exploring their separate impacts, allows some predictiveplanning and optimization for other interventions. The specific context here was residential food wasterecycling in apartment blocks of communities in Shanghai, China

Direct measurements were taken of residential food waste sorting in a sample from over 5000 communities (5 million households) assigned to a pilot program delivered by government branches in Shanghai which relied on an information strategy for implementation. The results are compared to a population of N=36 similar communities (36,000 households) assigned to a different program which involved considerable personal interaction. The results show that the information–based program communities did not noticeably sort their waste, whereas those given personal interaction approaches were very successful, with purity rates of 95%(8) and extra costs of about 50 RMB (8 USD) per household. This is a rare direct comparison of two different programs at such large scales, 6-36 months after launch, and suggests that personal interaction approaches should be considered by policy makers. Qualitative key informant interviews yielded data on each program’s activities, which provide suggestions for further studies of the underlying behaviour change determinants involved

Successful long-term programs for urban residential food waste sorting are very rare, despite the established urgent need for them in cities for waste reduction, pollution reduction and circular resource economy reasons. This study meets recent calls to bridge policy makers and academics, and calls for more thorough analysis of operational work in terms of behavioral determinants, to move the fields on. It takes a key operational element of a recently reported successful food waste sorting program-manning of the new bins by volunteers-and considers the behavioral determinants involved in order to design a more scalable and cheaper alternative-the use of brightly colored covers with flower designs on three sides of the bin. The two interventions were tested in a medium-scale, real-life experimental set-up that showed that they had statistically similar results: high effective capture rates of 32%-34%, with low contamination rates. The success, low cost and simple implementation of the latter suggests it should be considered for large-scale use. Candidate behavioral determinants are prompts, emotion and knowledge for the yellow bin intervention, and for the volunteer intervention they are additionally social influence, modeling, role clarification, and moderators of messenger type and interpersonal or tailored messaging.