Landfill or Recycle? Pro‐Environmental Receptacle Labeling Increases Recycling Contamination

Abstract

While aggregate recycling rates in developed countries have plateaued in recent years, the contamination rate of recycling streams due to consumers incorrectly recycling items that cannot be recycled has grown rapidly. We propose that this problem may be partially due to persuasive messages, such as pro-environmental labeling on bins, that encourage recycling, but may lack guidance on how to do so accurately. For example, a number of public garbage receptacles across the United States are labeled "Landfill" instead of "Trash," encouraging recycling by making the negative impact of garbage more salient. However, this labeling may also lead consumers to incorrectly "recycle" items that cannot be recycled (i.e., overinclusive recycling). Two field studies suggest that pro-environmental receptacle labeling can lead to overinclusive recycling, and a controlled experiment provides preliminary process evidence involving anticipated emotion from trashing versus recycling. Research opportunities and public policy implications for pro-environmental messaging are discussed.

Environmental Policies and the Promotion of Pro-Environmental Consumer Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Emotion is another important determinant of the behavior-change effects of environmental policies (Catlin et al 2021). Indeed, the emotive quality of the message is likely to impact how consumers respond to an informational policy (Spence and Pidgeon 2010).…”

“…Opportunity-facilitating informational instruments are informational interventions that provide minor alteration of the external environment where pro-environmental behavior occurs. They include point-of-action interventions that aim to affect consumers’ physical surroundings and decision context, such as carbon labeling (Yakobovitch and Grinstein 2016), in-store posters (Catlin et al 2021; Cooremans and Geuens 2019), routine feedback on energy use (Brülisauer et al 2020; Tiefenbeck et al 2013), leaflets/stickers (He and Kua 2013), and web-based energy monitoring and control systems (Sunikka-Blank and Iwafune 2011). Within the opportunity-facilitating instruments, a limited number of informational interventions foster two-way dialogue that focuses on relationship building within communities and among stakeholders.…”

Plant power: SEEDing our future with plant‐based eating

“…Prior research had found that consumers use more of an item when they know that it can be recycled (Catlin & Wang, 2013; Sun & Trudel, 2016) with recycling functioning as a mechanism to reduce negative emotions associated with wasting resources (Sun & Trudel, 2016). In another study, use of pro‐environmental labeling on garbage (e.g., relabeling “trash” cans as “landfill”) and recycling bins (e.g., “recycle more, save the earth” vs. “recycle”) evoked negative emotions associated with trashing, which led to an increase in materials placed in recycling bins, including many items which could not be recycled (Catlin et al, 2021). This phenomenon of “wish‐cycling”— wherein consumers toss items into the recycling bin hoping to reduce their negative impact on the environment—may alleviate people's guilt about generating waste and license over‐consumption.…”

“…Our review focuses on offering a framework to support consumers as they live these values. A search of the Journal of Consumer Psychology for articles at the intersection of food, sustainability, health, and social justice and ethical concerns reveals more than one hundred articles in the last twenty years that touch on these domains, with an increasing number of such articles published in the last five years (e.g., Catlin et al, 2021; Chernev & Blair, 2021; Florack et al, 2021; Grier et al, 2022; Kim & Yoon, 2021; Li et al, 2022; Nardini et al, 2021; Raghunathan & Chandrasekaran, 2021; Salerno & Sevilla, 2019; Simonson, 2020; Zane et al, 2016). We build our review on the foundation established by this extant research and related articles in marketing, nutrition, sustainability, social justice, and ethics.…”

How to calculate, use, and report variance explained effect size indices and not die trying

“…Behavioral scholars are trained and comfortable with significance tests, but are often less familiar with effect sizes, despite their essential role in research. For instance, we reviewed recent articles published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (2021, volume 31, issue 4) and the Journal of Consumer Research (2021, volume 48, issue 3) and found that in some cases effect size indices were not reported (Catlin et al, 2021; Davidson & Theriault, 2021; Hovy et al, 2021; Rathee, 2021), other papers were qualitative (Bajde & Rojas‐Gaviria, 2021; Kozinets et al, 2021), another (Janiszewski & van Osselaer, 2021) did not report data but endorsed reporting effect sizes, and Bayes indices were reported in still another (Taylor & Noseworthy, 2021), although regression coefficients and means are likely to be reported (Davidson & Theriault, 2021). In other articles, different effect sizes were reported, sometimes eta‐squared (Biswas et al, 2021; Donnelly et al, 2021; Gupta & Hagtvedt, 2021; van der Lans et al, 2021), or partial eta‐squared (Florack et al, 2021; Han & Broniarczyk, 2021; Lei & Zhang, 2021; Steffel & Williams, 2021), sometimes Cohen's d (Donnelly et al, 2021; Lei & Zhang, 2021; Rocklage et al, 2021; Steffel & Williams, 2021), or other indices (such as for categorical data, Cheng et al, 2021; Kim & Yoon, 2021).…”