The can challenge: Understanding the best ways to incentivise recycling through a diffusion approach

Understanding the best ways to incentivise recycling and improve the efficiency of waste practices is a key environmental, social, and economic management problem that needs addressing. We search for solutions to this issue by testing the effectiveness of two incentive mechanisms (a piece-rate and a lottery-based systems). We run a similar field experiment in three different locations, namely a student, residential and workplace environment, to verify the robustness of our findings and thus increase confidence in the external validity of our intervention. By interpreting recycling activity as marketable service, we employ a diffusion model to analyse the potential adoption of the service. We find that monetary rewards increase recycling levels in almost all locations, independently of the type of incentive. More specifically, incentivising recycling stimulates action by those on lower incomes through opportunities for income generation. By contrast, those in workplace environments engage with or without incentives, but the latter provides a boost. Diffusion seems to exist in each environment, but with differing levels of success. Our study contributes to the literature by providing evidence on how to best increase public involvement through recycling and provides important insights for policy making to address this worldwide relevant issue.