SHIFTING THE PUBLIC’S FOCUS FROM RECYCLING TO WASTE PREVENTION: HOW DO WE MOVE PEOPLE UP THE WASTE HIERARCHY? 

Keep Britain Tidy is an environmental charity that aims to eradicate litter and reduce waste, improve the quality of local places, and help people live more sustainably. While best known for our work around litter, we have a long history of engaging with the public around recycling more and preventing waste.

In our experience, people default to recycling rather than waste prevention and appear to lack understanding of what waste prevention (reduce and reuse) actually means. This is in direct contrast with the waste hierarchy (more commonly communicated to consumers as ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’) which tells us that recycling is only the third best option when looking to reduce the environmental impact of what we purchase, use and dispose of. In order to bring natural resource use and carbon emissions down to environmentally sustainable levels, we need people to buy less stuff and maximise the life of stuff that already exists: we urgently need the widespread adoption of waste prevention behaviours. 

We explored this issue through a programme of empirical research in order to better understand how to move people up the waste hierarchy from recycling to waste prevention. Our new report, Shifting the Public’s Focus from Recycling to Waste Prevention: How do we move people up the waste hierarchy? sets out that:

• Most people engage in some waste prevention behaviours but not necessarily extensively.
• Most people associate waste more with what they throw away than with what they buy.
• Most people think of ‘wasting better’ rather than ‘wasting less’.
• This confirms a fundamental misunderstanding of the waste hierarchy, where waste is seen as something to be ‘managed’ rather than prevented.
• This lack of knowledge is a significant, but overlooked, barrier to the take-up of waste prevention behaviours, which needs to be addressed.

The report also sets out a number of recommendations about how this knowledge gap can be filled through communications, to facilitate moving people up the waste hierarchy. We have used the insights from the research to develop a new behaviour change intervention – Buy Nothing New Month – which ran throughout January 2023 and will run again in January 2024.

Collectively, we have to attempt to counteract the marketing messages that people are bombarded with, continually pushing them to buy more stuff. We therefore need all those with an interest in this area to come together to educate and motivate people to move beyond recycling and make choices that reduce the environmental impact of what they purchase in the first place. We invite other organisations to collaborate with us, debate and share evidence to take this agenda forward.

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