EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

Reward or penalty, carrot or stick—which provides the most motivation to recycle household waste?

Recycling programs not only vary from country to country—different local authorities within the same nation often have contrasting ideas as to what works best. The success and failure of diverse recycling philosophies around the world, from pay-as-you-throw charges to voucher rewards, are instructive in this regard. And they can provide a template for countries and local authorities in creating their own recycling operations.

The Stick: Pay As You Throw
Some localities charge their residents for stickers, tags and bags. Each bag of non-recyclable trash in Aberdeen, Maryland, for example, requires a pre-paid sticker, like buying a stamp to mail a letter. Similar systems around the world involve attaching pre-paid tags to bins that need emptying, or purchasing different-colored bags to separate waste by type.

Alternatively, some areas impose annual fees and charge extra for non-recyclable waste. Roncade in northern Italy employed this method, requiring its households to separate their trash into five different bins. It found that this increased recycling from 14% to 80% during 2003-08.

Other areas charge by weight. Flanders in Belgium manages to recycle 62% of its municipal waste by weighing the bins on trucks, identifying the owners via microchips inside the bins, and assessing the owners accordingly.

The Carrot: Monetary Rewards
While proposed pay-as-you-throw plans have been met with public protest in the UK, an American-style ‘carrot’ approach has been hailed, drawing on the success of RecycleBank’s voucher rewards.

The Institute for Public Policy Research, a London-based think tank, called for a pay-as-you-throw system in August 2006. There were public complaints that same month, however, when councils (English local authorities) secretly planted 500,000 microchips in bins throughout England to record waste disposal habits, as residents feared fines would be imposed.

Councils later ignored the government’s invitation to participate in a pilot pay-as-you-throw scheme. Five councils across England were needed to take part, but the 21 January 2009 deadline passed without a single application.

Instead, vouchers will be piloted throughout several London boroughs in 2010, covering up to 100,000 homes. This time, households seem happy to have their bins tagged with microchips, with the prospect of earning up to £150 (US$247) a year for participating. London currently recycles only 21% of its household waste and it is hoped this new approach will increase that number significantly.

UK Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, pledged in his speech to the environmental lobby group Green Allowance in July 2008 that recycling would be rewarded through monetary vouchers under a Conservative government.

Osborne quoted the success of American recycling company RecycleBank, which rewards households up to $50 a month for the amount of recyclable trash they collect in bins monitored with microchips. He said the project had “increased the amount of household waste being recycled by more than 200%” in some communities.

Rewards encourage the poor to recycle, according to Osborne: “While the poorest households were previously the least likely to recycle, as soon as they start receiving a financial incentive for recycling, they typically become amongst the most likely households to recycle...Instead of using sticks, we can use carrots.”

Homeless people can also make money from recycling, by collecting empty beverage containers. Reverse vending machines and selected drinks vendors throughout Europe and America pay cash for such containers.

Another Stick: The Landfill Tax
Fining local authorities for the amount of waste their jurisdictions send to landfills is a big incentive for them to implement recycling, as they risk losing votes if they simply pass the fine down to taxpayers.

If England fails to reach the EU’s Landfill Directive to reduce waste to 50% of the 1995 figure by 2010, it will be fined £180 million ($256 million), which will be passed on to the taxpayer. England sent 58% of its waste to landfills in 2006/07, so, to avoid the future fine, the government started taxing councils for every ton of waste sent to landfills from April. This is then passed down to the taxpayer, costing the average household £30 ($49) this year.

In a money-driven society, ‘sticks’ can be an effective method of getting people to recycle. No one wants to pay more just to avoid the simple task of separating out recyclables. But ‘carrots,’ in the form of cash incentives, are a more agreeable way, at least initially, to spark people into action. Then, hopefully, there’ll come a day when residents act, not just for personal monetary gain, but because they understand the myriad benefits of recycling to their communities and the Earth.

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