The friction within recycling — a choice architectural perspective
More and more people will recycle, if they are provided with the easiest possible manner to do so. The contemporary way of recycling is taking too much time and effort on individuals. By this time and point, my claim is that the responsibility of recycling has been left too much to consumers’ responsibility — and this coming from someone who lives in “patronizing Nordic countries”.
I must not be the only one who really wants to recycle as much as possible, yet, struggles with daily hours and weekly rat race. There are so many other competing things to do in my daily life (many of them known as jobs to be done), I can not prioritize separating all kinds of boxes into smaller peaces, and rinsing and drying those clean each day. Moreover, this drying-packages-manner takes way too much space from our rather a small kitchen. I am fed up.
Take example coffee capsules such as Nespresso and Dolce Gusto. If you bump into any sort of advertisement of coffee capsules, the takeaway message is always “easy” and “effortless”. Just insert the capsule in the machine and let the water run through. Go and enjoy your coffee. Nobody takes responsibility of the recycling phase, though: Everything in that small capsule is recyclable, I presume: different sorts of plastics and foil. Unpacking (cutting with a knife or a pair of scissors!), sorting, and rinsing takes ca. five minutes per capsule. For a normal coffee drinker the amount of recycling time is easily 2000–6000 minutes per year. That is 1.4–4.2 days in a year just to recycle coffee capsules. I wonder how many coffee drinkers are willing to do that?
Moreover, is that kind of rinsing, drying, and sorting even the best and most efficient way to recycle? I do not know, and I do not want to be responsible to find every detail out! I just want to recycle my stuff and focus on other things.
At this point, someone points their finger at me: Then, why are you consuming so many boxes, capsules, and packages daily? Because I am a wealthy western human-being who is able to do so as long as no one is preventing me. And, I am not the only one. And, the more nations get wealthier, the more there will be similar consumers who want to enjoy a little bit everyday luxury — despite the consequences.
And, pointing fingers at individuals is not the point. The point is to find the true guilty ones: manufacturers, distributors, recycling firms, and the government. Yes, I am blaming the institutions whole-heartedly. They need to take more responsibility on the stuff they are making us buy and consume with the knowledge that many consumers still do not recycle. They need to push the rapid action button.
Minimize friction, maximize ease
The point of nudging is to modify the environment so that individuals make better choices for themselves (for further reading, try: Thaler & Sunstein: Nudge). The base idea is so that individuals do not make rational choices by themselves. Moreover, the surrounding environment has its influence on the types of decisions we make. People’s decisions are prone to altering the environment.
Alas, the current consumer environment doesn’t direct us to make any kind of wise choices. We are bombarded with “cheap”, “easy”, “new”, “effortless” etc. Even with the products that claim to be more sustainable or easily recyclable, how do I know? How do I really know? I can only rely on the marketing communication of a manufacturer — or news articles on which type of living is the best this time, starting with something like: “Top 10 reasons you have always lived wrong.”
This is where the institutions should forcefully nudge us to better consumer choices. If it is known:
- …which kind of grocery bag is absolutely the most sustainable option, make choosing the other options really hard.
- …what type of packaging is both easy to recycle, and also will be recycled due to the ease of recycling, regulate these kind of packages throughout the whole industry.
- …that most of all packages will not be recycled, because it is too much an effort, make the manufacturers design better packages.
- …that it doesn’t really matter if you don’t sort your waste — the recycling firms can sort it anyways rather economically and ecologically — stop putting the blame on individuals’ shoulders. We have enough to carry already.
As long as the responsibility is on consumers, who are not experts in recycling and who do not have enough cognitive capacity to continually compare and test different packages, products, and recycling methods, enough won’t be done. I blame it on the institutions, and demand better procedures on their side. Us consumers will follow, as soon as recycling and sustainable living is “cheap”, “easy”, “effortless” — you get the picture, right?
