Recycling captures less than a quarter of waste in the United States. Take plastics, a particularly pernicious waste material: every year, some 400 million metric tons of plastic are produced worldwide, more than the weight of all 8 billion humans combined. Less than 10 percent, by some estimates, of that plastic gets recycled. Instead, it ends up polluting far and wide, from the natural environment to our bodies (some evidence even suggests it can permeate the blood–brain barrier).
The waste predicament in the U.S. grows bigger with each passing year, despite Americans’ increasing concerns about waste-related pollution. In the face of this problem, beverage, packaging, and fossil-fuel corporations have pushed recycling as the solution to the colossal quantities of disposable products businesses produce. According to this line of thinking, waste is a problem that can be addressed at the end of a product’s life—if only individuals place it in the right bin. In reality, creating goods is still incredibly resource and energy intensive, no matter what happens to them later. We have to start, experts recommend, by reducing the amount of waste generated in the first place.
As scientists working at the intersection of sustainability and behavior, we wanted to explore how well people in the U.S. understand the environmental impact of the decisions they make when it comes to waste in their day-to-day lives. Through a series of studies recently published in Nature Sustainability, we found that people systematically overlook source reduction (that is, producing less waste in the first place) in favor of recycling. This is a tendency we call recycling bias and reduction neglect.
Although recycling may be top-of-mind, people may not be very confident that it’s a good waste management strategy.
However, as we dug further, we realized that people’s perceptions of the waste system and their own participation in it were even more nuanced than that. In some cases, what we observed weren’t information gaps but empowerment gaps. For example, participants were sometimes aware of the problems with the recycling system but didn’t feel like they had sufficient agency to enact change upstream where it would be more effective.
We ran a series of online studies comprising about 1,500 adults living in the U.S. In the first part of the study, we asked people open-ended questions about waste management (e.g., “Household waste can cause many environmental problems. What is the single most effective thing you can do in your day-to-day life that helps solve this problem?”) to better understand perceptions of the waste stream. Nearly half of them thought that recycling was the best thing they could do for sustainability.
The Environmental Protection Agency ranks common waste management strategies (including source reduction, recycling and composting, energy recovery, and landfilling) in order of most to least effective, in an inverted pyramid known as the waste management hierarchy. Only 1 in 4 participants in our second study got the order correct, and the majority thought that source reduction and reuse were roughly equivalent to recycling and composting in terms of environmental impact. These misperceptions tend to benefit companies who have been promoting recycling as a solution for decades because it took the heat off of them to create less wasteful products in the first place.
Even though our participants defaulted to recycling as their most effective waste-management strategy, they also demonstrated awareness of the issues with their chosen strategy. For example, participants in our first study estimated that the majority of plastic produced has not been recycled, but instead has ended up in landfills and the natural environment. Additionally, in our second study, participants were not very confident that items they put in the recycling bin actually get recycled. In other words, although recycling may be top-of-mind, people may not be very confident that it’s a good waste management strategy. Opting out of our dominant, disposal-oriented consumer culture may feel so impossible as to not even occur to our participants, who therefore perceive recycling as the best (albeit imperfect) option out of worse alternatives.
Despite these misperceptions, our research did reveal several bright spots. First, the recycling bias we uncovered was not static. When we made it salient that plastic would end up in the ocean, for example, participants tended to recommend producing less plastic in the first place. And when faced with fewer options in the survey (in contrast to open-ended or ranking questions), participants did understand that source reduction is better than recycling. Finally, when presented with a diagram of how products are made, starting with design and ending with disposal, our respondents showed that they did understand that upstream interventions are most effective. However, when asked about what part of the system they could impact, participants overwhelmingly indicated that they only felt empowered (or disempowered) as consumers and disposers.
People living in the U.S., it seems, default to disposing of waste rather than making decisions that would lead to less waste in the first place. This is harmful because there are negative impacts along the entire production supply chain, especially when goods are produced with the intention of disposing of them. Recycling does have a place in a sustainable waste management system, and is far better than landfilling, incinerating waste, or letting it escape to pollute the natural environment. Yet recycling is not a free pass to produce and consume without consequence: recycling is transportation- and energy-intensive, and in some cases introduces unintended environmental consequences, like flooding the food chain with microplastics.
Our results show that in some cases, people understand recycling has limitations, but in a consumer culture where generating waste can feel unavoidable, they perhaps see it as their least worst option. A system that relies on individuals to maintain an ever-growing list of what can and can’t be recycled, to sort items correctly, and to send them into an imperfect recycling process is never going to be as effective as creating fewer disposable products in the first place. Recycling should be treated as a last resort when waste generation cannot be avoided, rather than as a cure-all for our waste woes.