Marketers have long investigated what motivates us to buy stuff: how to arrange shopping aisles and shelves; the best colors, fonts, and logos to use on packaging; and so on. But, until recently, little work has gone into the other end of a product’s life: why and when we recycle. How come some of us do it and some of us don’t, and how come sometimes we forget or pretend it doesn’t matter, even when we know we should?
Remi Trudel, an assistant professor at Boston University, has begun to answer these questions in a series of experiments looking at our recycling ticks and foibles. For example, he’s found that we’re twice as likely to recycle when the item is relatively intact, compared to when it’s torn or crumpled. We’re more likely to recycle when we identify and like a brand鈥攚hether it’s a Coke, or a sweatshirt from college. And, we’re more likely to waste resources, perversely, when we know what we don’t use will be recycled. Recycling, in that sense, promotes consumption, as it frees us from the guilt of using more than we might, he says.
Trudel observed the first phenomenon鈥攚hat he calls “distortion bias”鈥攆rom looking at his colleagues’ waste containers. The recycling bins seemed to contain pristine items鈥攚hole plastic bottles and cans鈥攚hile the trash contained mangled, torn-up stuff. He subsequently tested the observation in a research study, and the pattern held: Something about the intactness of objects seems to cause us to value it more. Trudel says we might think about designing packaging that stays relatively in one piece when we open it, rather than, say, a thick plastic shell that you need to destroy on opening.
The observation about “identity bias”鈥攖hat we’re more likely to recycle when we identify with a product鈥攊s equally interesting. “We consistently found that people are more likely to recycle than discard identity-linked products鈥攁nd that trashing these products can lower self-esteem. As might be expected, it feels bad to throw a piece of yourself in the trash, so people avoid it,” Trudel writes in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. Branded goods are more likely to be recycled than unbranded goods, he says, and if we like Coke over Pepsi, we’re more likely to recycle the former than the latter.
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