Does readily available recycling cause increased consumption? According to a recent study out of UC-Irvine
(#Kiron), yes it does.
In order to come to this conclusion, the authors ran two separate experiments. In the first, volunteers were divided into
two groups - one with recycling bins and one without – and asked to test a new
pair of scissors by cutting different shapes out of paper. The group with recycling bins used, on
average, almost twice as much paper as those without. In the second study, a recycling bin was
placed in a restroom on a university campus that previously only had a trash
can. After the recycling bin was
installed, paper towel usage increased.
One theory put forward for why this occurs is that the availability of
recycling might counteract the guilt that comes from over-consumption and
wastefulness. If the products are being
recycled, then you don’t really feel like you are wasting them. Sort of like the rebound effect, except that
instead of reducing monetary costs, you are reducing emotional costs.
We should note that the study only tested free resources. If these were products that had an actual
cost to the end user, we probably wouldn’t have seen a consumption
increase. Of course, we didn’t expect an
increase in the free scenario either, so hopefully there will be a follow up
study soon.
Another interesting factoid from this study (yes we read the whole
thing) is that the average office worker uses 10,000 pieces of copy paper
annually. This number seems absurdly
high to us: assuming you work 50 weeks per year (at five days per week) that
comes out to 40 sheets of paper per day.
Have any of you out there ever used this much paper? If so, what kind of work were you doing?
Interesting observation! But sounds a simplistic premise... Not sure the recycling bin was the only variable between the 2 groups... Eg: was one of the group fine art/craft students vs the other group hard science ones, one being more particular before they concluded about the product, or vice versa (faster to conclude), perhaps?! Were one group having more american born vs more asian born students in the other group? But anyway, its an interesting thought... I would have thought that wastage/saving is more visceral/deeper ingrained into our psyche by how we perceive scarcity of resources in general vs suddenly getting a recycle bin for one project one day.
ReplyDeleteAlso nice catch on the factoid! In the BPO world we do find 40+pages/process/day but only in processes where Tax/Stat documentation needs to maintain much work in paper
Hello Green Team! (This is a comment from one of the authors of the study. Kiron sent me the link.) First of all, thank you for including our research in your post. Second, in response to the comment above, to help minimize differences due to factors like major, ethnicity, etc., the participants in the paper cutting task were drawn from the same subject pool of undergraduates and assignment to the experimental conditions was random. We also certainly agree that there is additional research to be done (in fact, we are working on some) in this area to see if this effect may apply beyond the paper product scenarios here. Thanks again for your interest and keep up the good work!
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