Working Paper No. 381: How social norm feedback can reduce unsorted waste and increase recycling in the residential sector

Abstract

The EU waste legislation requires member states to prepare 55% of municipal waste for re-use and recycling, to recycle 65% of all packaging waste by 2025, and to limit landfilling municipal waste to 10% by 2035. A large majority of the member states are at risk of missing one or more of these targets. Thus, there is a need to identify additional policies beyond command-and-control and market-based instruments that can effectively contribute to these targets. This policy brief describes one such policy: social norms feedback. This has been trialled with nearly 20,000 households in Sweden that faced Pay-as-you-throw schemes. In this setting, the unsorted waste fraction was reduced by around 10% and three quarters of that was due to increased recycling. The large trial sample and wide-ranging socio-economic characteristics suggests that 10-20% reduction of unsorted waste can be expected in jurisdictions with flat tariffs. If local governments collaborate and share the cost of waste truck equipment, then the policy is likely to generate a substantial economic surplus.