We all know the importance of recycling in making an environmental impact, but sometimes, this is easier said than done.
VCCP’s London office is home to approximately 900 people, and across each of the five floors, there are bins for general waste as well as different types of recycling. However, despite these bins being labelled, many staff don’t recycle their litter, with some even going so far as to throw away office cutlery.
Based on this, our challenge was to encourage employees to recycle correctly and more often as part of VCCP’s efforts to become more sustainable.
Distil: Getting to the root of the recycling barriers
Digging up effective green levers: literature review & the SHIFT framework
We conducted a literature review and used the SHIFT framework to identify the most effective levers for encouraging ecologically sustainable employee behaviours. We identified that successful schemes set social norms, making recycling a shared behaviour. We also utilised positive reinforcement to further incentivise recycling.
Behavioural bin barriers: friction audit & the COM-B framework
In our initial phase, we conducted an audit of the office space to identify points of psychological friction. We applied the COM-B framework to create core themes centred around key behavioural components, including Capability, Opportunity and Motivation. We found the two key themes were:
- Psychological capability (know-how): Employees lacked knowledge about correct disposal and VCCP’s broader sustainability goals
- Environmental opportunity (physical surroundings): the physical environment hindered recycling efforts
Re-circling back on the themes: establishing the core behavioural barriers
From these barriers, we pulled out the behavioural biases that sat at the heart of them. These were:
- Ambiguity Aversion (a dislike for uncertainty): People didn’t know how to separate their litter correctly for each of the bins
- Saliency (the key information not being clearly visible): Information about how to recycle was hard to find
- Social Norms (our desire to follow other people): No widely accepted recycling behaviour to follow
- Positive Reinforcement (we want to be celebrated for our efforts): People aren’t celebrated when they recycle correctly
Design: Green interventions through genuine creativity
Our next phase focused on developing interventions based on the identified behavioural barriers. By transforming barriers into "How might we" questions, we brainstormed over 60 different ideas.
From these, we identified the ideas that pulled on our heartstrings or that made the most business sense, and plotted them on a matrix that evaluated feasibility against impact. We mapped our interventions on this to identify the ideas that struck a balance between enabling recycling and being practical to implement.
After this considered evaluation, six interventions emerged, falling into three categories:
1. Prompting the Right Behaviour
- Placing clear signage at eye level
- Creating positive friction so people have time to pause and think about separating their litter
2. Improving Education & Awareness
- Launching a poster competition to educate on proper waste separation
- Creating comms that educate employees about what happens with recycled waste
3. Motivating People to Recycle
- Creating an interdepartmental recycling competition with an exciting prize
Future: The next steps
We’re now in the process of creating and developing the conceptual designs for the interventions, and are working alongside VCCP’s ESG team to launch them in 2024.
After the launch, our aim is to develop an experiment that will allow us to test the effects of the interventions on recycling rates, and how it is impacting specific bins.
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