Fixing recycling for consumers

My partner and I recently moved to a new apartment in a ‘green’ building in Sydney, Australia. This eco-friendly building is almost self-sufficient in energy with its own low-carbon natural gas power plant and internal water recycling plant — it is quite a marvel. Of course, as most buildings do now, it entices its residents to be good citizens and sort their rubbish: there is a chute for your general waste and yellow bins for recyclable waste products.

After a couple of months living there, I was appalled to see what other residents were putting in the yellow bins: leftovers of food, clothes, kitchenware and all sorts of things that were definitely not recyclable. The building management decided to step in and displayed clear printed instructions aiming to help people recycle better. But it didn’t change much unfortunately…

At first, I was very much tempted to blame people for being lazy and not giving a damn about the environment. And let’s face it, people’s lack of motivation plays a major role here. But then I realised that actually the recycling instructions and application rules were also to blame; it was reducing people’s ability to recycle effectively. According to the famous behavioural model of Dr. BJ Fogg, when motivation to do something is low, it needs to be easier for people to act on it.

Based on my personal experience, I see three main reasons why recycling is not always straightforward for people:

And I am not even mentioning here all the different places where you are simply not offered the option to recycle (which sadly makes it easier in a way), like public libraries, parks or hotels and service apartments.

So what could be done to fix this hairy problem? Well, I think different things should be looked at:

Ultimately, it is very likely that one day we won’t even need to bother recycle as machines will do it for us. We could have smart robots at home, working for us like ‘super housemaids’ and dealing with all the house chores (including sorting rubbish), the same way we already have robot vacuum cleaners, like Roomba. Those smart robots already exist, like ones from the Finnish company ZenRobotics, but they only operate in industrial soring centres. I believe it is just a matter a years before we get our own WALL.E at home.

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