RRFB Nova Scotia is looking to update the waste sorting signage that we provide free-of-charge to residents, businesses, schools, festivals, etc. Currently these decals are graphic based and color coded to the various streams (see http://www.rrfb.com/bin-signage.asp). We are considering using real pictures of waste items in our new signs and would be open to other suggested improvements. I would be interested in any research/ studies that exist around effective signage for waste diversion.
Alanna McPhee
Manager, Education
RRFB Nova Scotia
Canada
Effective Signage for Waste Diversion
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I am interested in any experience or comments that others have about this too. I have a comment and then I'd like to piggyback my similar situation on to the original post.
First my comments:
I am in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador and we introduced voluntary residential curbside recycling almost two years ago. One of the educational pieces we sent to residents prior to the program start was a fridge magnet using both text and images of recyclable items. We choose illustrated items to coordinate with our program branding. I've attached the fridge magnet.
Soon after the curbside recycling program began we received comments from some residents that they would like to see pictures of real items as opposed to illustrated items. From those comments we created a brochure that we mailed to all residents and use at events and other outreach activities. I've attached the brochures below - we receive a lot of postivie feedback about it.
Now for my situation:
We are currently designing signage to put on public recycling bins to align with our relatively new residential curbside recycling program. We have chose to use pictures of items for this rather than illustrations. At the curb we have two stream recycling, papers go in one blue bag and containers go in another. Garbage goes in a separate bag (most often black or green). We don't yet have curbside collection of organics so if residents are not backyard composting then organics go in with the garbage.
Our public bins are three steam. One point we are debating is separate colour coding for each type of waste or if we reiterate the bag colours we require at the curb. To have separate colours we are looking at recyclable containers are blue, recyclable papers are green or grey, and garbage is red or black. To reiterate what we expect at the curb it would be that both recyclable containers and papers are blue and that garbage is black or grey. I have attached a mock-up of each.
Our current debate centres around if we should have separate colour coding for each waste type to reduce the liklihood of contamination or if we should reiterate the bag colours we require at the curb. We have more than 70 per cent of residents participating in our voluntary program and have only about 3 per cent contamination in the blue bags. We want to create the bin signage to build on the success we are seeing in the homes be reflected in public spaces.
Shelley Pardy
Waste Diversion Communications Supervisor
City of St. John's
Canada
http://www.stjohns.ca/cityservices/environment/wastediversion.jsp
Hi Alanna,
We had similar signage for businesses and events - pictures with no text. We repeatedly had requests for signage with pictures and some text, so we compromised with photos and text examples. We don't have any studies to back up our changes, but we have had very favourable responses to the new signage. We would be happy to share the original photos. I've attached a few examples more can be seen on our website: http://fundyrecycles.com/business/downloadable-sort-guides/
Brenda MacCallum
Fundy Region Solid Waste Commission
Canada
Hi Alanna,
I worked at Metro Vancouver before I moved to sunny Victoria, BC. At Metro we developed a very large library of photos and icons, all of which are free for anybody to download at http://3rs.ca/Resources/Pages/default.aspx or http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/solidwaste/Pages/Resources.aspx
I would strongly discourage the use of photographs on signage. And, in relation to some other comments, I would strongly encourage the use of colour coding. I would also strongly encourage trying to standardize the colour coding and icons across your region, province, and ideally the whole country.
Let me offer some tidbits from my research on behaviour change at Metro to support my suggestions.
"Humans reason as cats swim: They can do it, but they avoid it whenever possible."
Donald E. Watson
Dr. Roy Baumeister has extensively researched and published on willpower and decision making, and has discovered both use glucose in the brain. Making a decision uses up glucose, so then you make bad decisions until your glucose is refreshed. A recent study found enormous differences in parole rates if the board was meeting before lunch or after lunch.
Because of this physical limitation on the amount of decisions we can make and analysis we can do, we have developed habits and rules of thumb. Dr. Daniel Kahneman's new book "Thinking Fast and Slow" elaborates on the fast, habitual system and the slow analytical system. Because attention and analysis takes so much energy, we are very reluctant to do it. In fact, our brain resists doing it.
Most of our behaviour is controlled habitually--you know how you can drive home and realize when you get there you have no memory of the trip? That was deep habit doing the driving so your brain could rest. We use habits all the time--we buy the same laundry soap, the same toilet paper etc. etc. We do this so we can save our easily-depleted brain glucose for important things like making money to pay the mortgage and parenting our children.
So, the point of prompts, for example, is to build and trigger habits. Commitments focus our attention so we will build habits.
Rules of thumb are the next easiest thing--if the plastic doesn't have a number on it, well, "When in doubt, throw it out." That takes a little more brain juice, but still does not require energy-intensive analysis.
And the last thing we should do is try to educate. It is simply too energy intensive, and so our audience actively resists our efforts. Education is a last-ditch tactic.
Now, one more piece I think is important. Tor Nørretranders estimates that the human eye generates more than 10 million bits of data per second. Our brain extracts only about 40 bits of data per second, and only 16 bits reach our conscious vision and attention. http://bit.ly/PjyGn9
So, very little of the visual information we see reaches our consciousness. Most of it is simply filtered out and thrown away while the rest is filed in our subconscious.
Our signage, then, needs to support and trigger habits. And it will have the greatest chance of doing that if it is simple and clear so it does not get discarded and filtered by a brain that is trying to save its energy for more important things. I would suggest the simplest and clearest images that get the job done. The original post uses coloured images--I would ask if the colour offers any important information, or if it just clogs your brain while increasing printing costs. The original images also have the "wiggle lines" around each image, as if the recycling is shaking back and forth. That just adds visual noise and clogs our brain.
Road signage is a pretty good example of this--it has been refined for decades, and when it is bad, people die, so there is a good motivation to get it right.
If you think about stop signs, you could erase the word STOP off every sign in North America, and nothing would change. A red octagon gives you all the information you need. At this point, the word STOP is actually visual clutter our brain discards.
Turning lane signs are different story--if you erased the arrow, you erase the information, even though the shape and colour of the sign remain. So, in that context, the shape, colour, and icon are all important information.
Now, have you ever seen a highway sign with a picture on it? Imagine you are driving into the Lower Mainland--would a big colour picture of the City of Surrey and a big colour picture of the City of Vancouver do any good? First of all, in order to be able to tell the differences between the two cities, the pictures would have to be huge and expensive. They would convey so much data your brain would be overloaded at 100 km/h. And, of course, if you have never seen the skylines and look of the two cities, the photos would be useless to you. So, effective traffic signs usually convey information in a few different ways: The city name, a highway number, and a highway icon (the Crow's Nest highway has a silhouette of a crow, US interstates use a shield shape).
Photographs give too much detail to effectively trigger habits. They require consideration and attention, which increases the chance they will be ignored. Every recycling stream should have its own colour and a simple icon. Again, please check out the links from Metro Vancouver above, and feel free to download all the resources you like.
Photographs should be reserved for education, not signage. You need to link cans and bottles to the blue stream and paper to the yellow stream, so when people walk up to a recycling station they automatically put the paper in the yellow bin. They don't need to think about it. As Shelley said, educational photographs and communications should go in a brochure, or be provided in other ways. It should not be on the recycling bin.
Spend some time observing situations in which people have a lot of detail and choices--they tend to just dump everything in the garbage. The education is not effective at the recycling station--it should be done in communications elsewhere, and over a long time. When somebody has their hands full of recyclables is when you want to trigger habits with simple colours and icons.
And just some notes on other comments....
Our focus groups found most people prefer a mix of words and icons--but Metro Vancouver has a very large proportion of non-native English speakers. If you are fluent in English, of course it is easy for you read English. But when half of the region was not born with English, and when we see lower recycling rates in some ethnic groups, it sure suggests we should use more icons. And even among people for whom English is their first language, we face significant literacy challenges. One study found 15% of Canadians could not read an aspirin bottle, and a further 27% cannot understand a Material Safety Data Sheet, of the sort you would need to understand to safely do jobs like janitorial work. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/education/canada-shame.html
I noticed the use of Organics in the original post. When Metro was testing curbside collection we actually tested the wording, and organics is bad. Organics is the word used by Solid Waste Engineers, but I can assure you, there are not 2.5 million solid waste engineers living in Metro Vancouver.
When we surveyed our region (statistically valid sample size, in English, Cantonese and Punjabi) we found that people think organic is related to things like vegetables and shampoo, and typically associate it with higher prices. They felt no connection to composting.
We also tested Food Waste, Kitchen Waste, Food Scrap and Kitchen Scraps. Our research found that waste is a very nebulous term--is it a noun or a verb? What does it mean?
Kitchen Scraps caused confusion with other scraps that come from a kitchen, like aluminum foil and plastic wrap.
Food Scraps was the most clear and accurate across all language groups tested. Metro calls its program Food Scraps Recycling-everybody know what recycling is, you put your recycling in a box and take it to the curb, so Food Scraps recycling piggybacks on existing knowledge.
And finally, I would like to make a pitch for really working together. In Vancouver, we get the Globe and Mail, where you can see ads for Toronto's recycling program. That means Toronto's web URL is polluting the brains in Vancouver. It is the same with the Vancouver Sun in Victoria. Since there are such fuzzy lines in Canadian media, we are actually making each other's jobs harder. This is why Metro developed 3Rs.ca --to be a portal that any Canadian can go to. Don't try to remember the crazy long URL for your city's recycling program, just remember 3Rs.ca. That means that anybody who sees an ad from anywhere in Canada gets the website reinforced, not weakened.
And similar for colours and icons. Everybody knows what the blue box means and the green stream is pretty strong. It would make all our work more effective if we tried to use the same colours, and ideally the same icons across the whole country. That will just reduce brain junk and increase the ease and effectiveness of habits.
All of Metro's resources are free to use, including transit ads and TV spots. Please download the icon and signage files and use as you see fit. Metro continues to work on this, if you would like to build partnerships. I would also be happy to chat about the work I did in this area while I was there, if you contact me through this thread.
If you are interested in more detail about behaviour change, there is a video of my talk at the 2011 Recycling Council of BC's annual conference at http://vimeo.com/26943709
Warmly,
Ruben.
Ruben Anderson
Thank you for the feedback to date.
In response to Shelley in St John's, I did want to share the guidelines RRFB Nova Scotia has developed for public waste separation containers. We find that color coding and bin design are very critical when it comes to proper waste separation. Based on a small research project, as well as anecdotal information from our regional waste management staff, we promote the following guidelines for waste containers:
http://www.rrfb.com/bin-guidelines.asp
Cheers,
Alanna
Alanna McPhee
Manager, Education
RRFB Nova Scotia
Canada
My only experience is as a user and I really appreciate the combination of photos & words. For example, I regularly consult San Diego's excellent curbside recycling flyer -- available online at http://www.sandiego.gov/environmental-services/pdf/recycling/101112yesno.pdf -- when deciding what to recycle at home. It's updated each year as more becomes recyclable and the pictures make it easier for me to identify quickly & remember what's allow and what's not.
One recommendation: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) -- or, better yet, KISAC (Keep It Simple And Consistent). I get frustrated when I eat at Whole Foods and try to make appropriate decisions re which bins to use to discard food scraps, the plates they're on, utensils, cups, etc.; the pictures help but its signage is waaaaaaaaaay too difficult to decode and seems inconsistent with the labels on its containers.
Jo Brooks
United States
Simply as food for thought - I've found this example to be rather encouraging. http://innovativeecon.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/nudging-pitt-students-pt-2-%E2%80%93-the-results/
Also as Jo has mentioned, it's important to remember, simplicity is key to users. There's nothing worse than standing in front of a series of bins and having to read through a large amount of information before making a decision. If they can't decipher the signage, it's going in the garbage!
Karen Mason-Bennett
Program Coordinator
NEAT
Canada
The Association of Post Consumer Plastics Recyclers just came out with a campaign to for "education with out numbers" (resin codes). They have suggestions about effective signage and examples at http://www.plasticsrecycling.org/market-development/education-without-numbers
Kate Melby
Emmet County Recycling
United States
I want to thank everyone for your suggestions, comments and links to other resources. I have learned some new things, reinforced some of my beliefs and have new ideas to consider.
We have decided to go use the colours papers = grey, containers = blue and garbage = black on our bins. Thank you all for your clear message that colour prompts are important and that each waste stream should be a differnt colour. I also agree with trying to be consistent with other jurisdictions.
We will use the real pictures of items instead of illustrations or icons on our bins - partly due to recycling still being so new here (less than two years old) and that many of the workers and visitors in our city come from neighbouring communities that do not yet have recycling programs. We had originally had illustrations of recyclables but some of the items weren't clear, we didn't even know what they were supposed to be showing!
The bins we are outfitting now are ones my department 'inherited' and we have refurbished them as best we can. We cannot change the shape or size of the openings.
Thanks again for all your comments. Ruben I have watched your talk to the BC Recycling Council several times and have had my peers, employees and summer students watch it as well. The only person in my workplace that has not yet watched it is my manager - but I won't give up trying to get him to sit down for 30 minutes to see it!
Shelley Pardy
Waste Diversion Communications Supervisor
City of St. John's
Canada
http://www.curbitstjohns.ca
The University of Pittsburgh's experiment on the use of the term "landfill" is encouraging but note that this was done in a controlled environment (a campus facility). Our initial experience with labelling waste drums in our city parks with the prompt "Put waste in the right place - Landfill" to encourage proper litter disposal and reduce cross-contamination had an unfortunate result in some inner-city locations: dumping of residential waste in or around the parks waste barrels was observed to increase. When a Parks employee approached one resident caught in the act of dumping his bag of residential garbage in one of these containers, the resident's excuse was that the container indicated that the contents were going to landfill - which was where his extra garbage needed to go!
On the subsequent printing of the labels we've resorted to the wording "Put waste in the right place - Litter container" as well as adding "No household garbage." A photo is attached.
Philip Homerski
Information & Business Advisor
City of Hamilton Public Works Department
Canada
I wanted to say that I thought this thread has been very educational and loaded with great tips; one of the best on recycling in quite some time. At the City of Olympia in Washington State we've gone to color coding with gray or black representing garbage, blue for recycle and green for compost/organics. In the late 90s a dark green was used for residential recycle carts and blue carts for MF. Gray carts were for garbage and at the same time we had a brighter (safeway) green for yard waste. Moreover, we were inconsistent with educational materials. After expanding to include food scraps in 2008, it became apparent we needed to standardize colors. We are now replacing dark green recycle carts with blue and have developed our materials so that gray/black = garbage/landfill, blue = recycle and green = organics/compost. We have a single stream recycle system so we dont have the added complexity of multiple recycle streams and the need for more colors. That said, glass is a contentious issue and there may be a day we will need to collect separately. If that day comes I suspect we will continue to use blue or a shade of blue for it.
Ruben Alexander made a good point when he talked about context and how it has taken years/decades to develop road signage into a cultural norm that takes nearly no thought process. This has happened because of consistency. I really think this is where we are struggling with waste and recycling programs. It has to be the same everywhere. How we get there I dont know. In the last days of the National Recycling Coalition, before it merged with Keep America Beautiful there was a push for iconography, similar to what is used for the Olympics. The argument is that all the different icons helped people navigate to the appropriate venue and event. Again, I think context is a major contributor to the success of these icons. The majority of people going to see a particular sport (IMHO) are going to have a connection with the icons, especially the sports they follow and are interested in. They are going to recognize an icon for swimming, volleyball, etc. What works well for the Olympics may not translate easily to recycilng becasue the context has not been established yet. Recycling is still very much in the throes of adolescence and suffering from lots and lots of growing pains, uncertainty of the future and a great deal of experimentation. The fact these discussions are now going on is proof (I hope) that recycling is beginning to mature.
I guess I would encourage folks to consider leaving shades of gray and black as the color for landfill. We already have other types of waste using these colors. In RVs, gray water is the sink water and black water is the sewage. For plumbing it is a gray or black pipe. With respect to drinking water, white is for drinking (typically) and now reclaimed water uses purple. Purple being a shade of blue (recycle).
City of Olympia educational materials can be viewed at www.olympiwa.gov/wastewise or www.olympiawa.gov/recycle A workgroup spearheaded by the Washington State Department of Ecology recently finalized a BMP guide for commingled recycling outreach. The guide points to standardization and colors as one key to recycling success. The document should be posted to their online information clearinghouse soon. When its posted I will send out a link to this thread.
Again, Ive enjoyed all the comments, discussion, downloads and links.
Ron Jones
Senior Waste Reduction Specialist
[email protected]
Ron Jones
Sr. Program Specialist
City of Olympia
United States
www.olympiawa.gov
One more thing to consider - if you use plastic bags/liner in your bins is to color coordinate those as well. It helps with the logistics to make sure the right bag goes to the right place (makes it easier for janitorial staff). We use blue or green for recycling/single stream, black or grey for trash, and clear/biodegradable for compost.
Janice Henderson
Sr. Planner
MASCO
United States
While attending the BALLE conference in Bellingham Washington in 2011 I discovered this program by the City of San Fransisco. This may be along the lines of what you are looking for and I think you can contact them for use of their system.
http://signmaker.sfenvironment.org/recycle/
shannon johnson
local economy manager
cabarrus county
United States