Message from the MRF Worker

Overview & Objective 

Dealing with recycling contamination can cost local authorities significant sums of money and depress their recycling rates. Through our Inside the Head of the Contaminator research conducted in 2020, Keep Britain Tidy found that:

• People are not actively seeking out the information on correct recycling behaviours, nor updating their knowledge.
• Communications that do reach people effectively tend to be proactive, disruptive and meet them where they are – e.g. through the door communications.
• Most people do not understand that their individual behaviours have an impact, nor how ‘the recycling system’ works.

Based on these insights, Keep Britain Tidy set out to test the messenger effect, which suggests that communications can be more effective if delivered by specific messengers. To do this, we developed an intervention aimed at decreasing recycling contamination from households – involving new through the door communications from local materials recovery facility (MRF) workers, encouraging residents to recycle correctly to reduce contamination. Keep Britain Tidy partnered with two local authorities on this pilot – Great Yarmouth Borough Council and Luton Borough Council. The pilot was made possible thanks to players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Approach

• Pre and post-intervention monitoring of household recycling bins took place in the areas where residents received the communication, to test for a change in recycling behaviours.
• Doorstep perception surveys were carried out to assess recall and perceptions of the communication received.
• End of project interviews with both partners took place to interpret monitoring findings and perceived success of the intervention.

Delivered to households in areas with high contamination rates, the communication included information on contamination of multiple materials, rather than contamination of a particular material. The communication also included the name and photograph of the MRF worker/s themselves. To develop the messages, Keep Britain Tidy carried out interviews with staff members of the MRF in partnering areas, at the outset of the project.

Outcome

Overall, the intervention led to an average of 12% reduction in the number of households contaminating across all four collection rounds. For a messaging technique that is replicable and simple to produce at scale, this result is very positive.

If we exclude contamination of soft plastics, often incorrectly thought to be recyclable, this increases to 29% of households who stopped contaminating all other materials.

From the perception surveys, 29% of residents who recalled receiving the communication said that they had changed what items they do and do not put in their recycling bin; 9% reported visiting the council website to find out more; and 18% said they kept the information to refer to in future.

These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Message from the MRF Worker as a successful approach to tackling contamination and represents cost savings to councils.

Message from the MRF Worker has been shortlisted for Campaign of the Year - Over £10k at the National Recycling Awards 2023.