Effectiveness of Recycling toters/carts vs. Recycle Dumpsters

Hi Matt,

I don't have the precise answer you are looking for, but I do have some good stuff.

My colleague and I spent several years on two pilot projects at townhouse developments in Metro Vancouver. At the best on, we saw a 250% increase in diversion from garbage, so that is a big success.

Metro Vancouver has a goal of 80% diversion from garbage, very progressive. However, at site after site I would calculate how much of the waste stream was dedicated to diversion.

Usually it was about 10%. 10% of the volume of toters, bins and dumpsters was for diversion and 90% was for garbage. Obviously you can't fit 80% of the material into 10% of the space.

And so naturally, we say those people are lazy, stupid and uncaring.

Sorry, bit of a pet peeve there.

So, we added toters, which were promptly filled with recycling. We added more toters. We added food scraps bins and cardboard dumpsters. We found very little results from our prompts, feedback and norming experiments, but consistent improvements with GIVING PEOPLE MORE SPACE FOR DIVERSION.

So, most people know most of what to do. Most people know recycling is a good thing. (This may be different in your jurisdiction, but assume people are good, and caring).

It turns out people weren't lazy, stupid or uncaringunless you are talking about the waste engineers. The problem was we shook our finger at the residents, and gave them 10% of the space to recycle in.

Another experiment was a quick test of the Blue Box effect. We had a site that was changing from shared, centralized toters to individual blue boxes. Common belief is that personal ownership increases recycling. But, in this SMALL and SHORT test, we saw no increase in recycling behaviour with individual bins.

We often heard from people how they would get frustrated and stop recycling because the totes were overflowing with material. They would carefully separate their stuff, bag it, carry it outside...and find the tote overflowing. So they would take it back in and try again next week. It doesn't take too many repeats before any normal person will throw their recycling in the garbage and not bother.

We also found garbage dumpsters were hilariously oversized. Our jurisdiction was paying private haulers huge and needless sums to tip air.

So.....

1) Increase your recycling space. Personally, I like the combination of blue totes for recycling and a more centralized dumpster for cardboard.

2) Add food and yard scraps collection. If your jurisdiction does not do that yet, do not fall for the crap idea of not collecting yard scraps. The residents, real human beings, don't think it makes any sense that they can put their food scraps in a green bin, but not their grass clippings. Don't breed resentment and withdrawal.

3) Downsize your garbage dumpsters. Collect data, by weight from the hauler, or by volume visually. Downsize your dumpster as aggressively and as far as you can.

YOU WANT TO SEND THE SIGNAL THAT THERE SHOULD BE VERY LITTLE GARBAGE.

So, if the numbers work, it is preferable to have a smaller dumpster tipped more often.

So, that is participation. Now for contamination.

Try to break behaviour down into little pieces. Where is the choice made, in this case the improper sorting of material?

At home, it is mostly made in the kitchen.

So, you don't need much in the way of signage on your bins or dumpsters. Sure, it is easy to put it there, but you are wasting your money.

You need a hierarchy of information. On the tote should be a simple black and white icon, showing the material stream, along with a standardized colour.

This same icon and colour set should be repeated at sorting stations all around your region, in homes, in schools, in offices. We are trying to trigger habits here. THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR EDUCATION.

When you give people to much information, their brains freak out defensively, and chances are, they will dump everything in the garbage, or everything in the recycling. There is your contamination. At the bin, you want to trigger habits. You need to build those habits elsewhere.

We gave educational booklets. These booklets are very graphic, with very few words. What few words there are translated into several languages.

Each page shows one material. There is a picture of the material, a guide to handling, and the COLOUR AND ICON. This is connecting detailed information to the ICON and COLOUR.

This booklet is designed to sit in the kitchen drawer, for very occasional reference.

Fridge magnets or stickers are good idea. These are NOT PHOTOGRAPHS. Photographs are too detailed for a magnet or a sticker, you need to do that work in the booklet. The sticker or magnet just show green and red, yes or no, and the icons. So they help you remember which material goes in which tote.

And finally, you have brochures, news stories, magazine articles, TV spots etc. These are the most detailed items, which should still be connecting the material to the ICON AND COLOUR.

So, I had all these materials professionally developed at Metro, and they are mostly free to download. You can contact Peter Cech at Metro Vancouver for a copy of the Blue Book, which we designed to be a PDF that is as drag and drop as possible. The original Illustrator files are also available if you want to do some customization.

You can download much of the signage and sticker files at
http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/solid-waste/recycling-signage-campaigns/Pages/default.aspx

Long ramble, hope that helps.

Ruben Anderson
smallanddeliciouslife.com