Incentives for Plastic Recycling: How to Engage Citizens in Active Collection. Empirical Evidence from Spain

Abstract

The recycling target for plastics is expected to increase Europe-wide from 22.5% to 55% by 2025, hence the relevance of incentive schemes and the need to reach conclusions about how to encourage families to recycle more. Following this objective, a pilot project was implemented and a virtual reward token called RECICLOS created to encourage recycling among families, using incentives and awards to improve recycling behaviour and a webapp prototype to register the recycled plastic. By the end of the 6-week pilot project, 1053 families were registered on the scheme, representing 10% of the targeted population in the pilot area of the county of Pla de l’Estany, Catalonia, Spain. The novelties were the introduction of a token, the gamification of incentives through raffles and lotteries, webapp-based direct communication with citizens, and feedback after collecting and registering the recycled material. The multidimensional aspects of recycling activities, their strong relation with human behavioural patterns, and the high demand for communication and interaction mean that mobile technologies find significant application in this field. The results show that people can be influenced and their recycling habits changed by means of varied, effective, and innovative incentive schemes.

Enhancing marine citizenship as a strategy to promote the reduction of single-use plastics consumption in different cultures

“…In this case, as expected in Hypothesis IV, recycling was significantly more frequent in Spain than in Mexico. Again, the different recycling habits and policies in Spain (Escario et al, 2020;Gibovic and Bikfalvi, 2021) and Mexico (Munoz-Melendez et al, 2021) would explain the observed differences.…”

“…To check the applicability of marine citizenship as an enhancer of other environmental behaviors, we will tackle its effects on litter sorting as well. This practice is widely implemented and generalized in Spain, where approximately 80% of citizens usually separate glass, paper, and plastic (Escario et al, 2020;Gibovic and Bikfalvi, 2021), while in Mexico, the management of solid urban waste is a priority but is still a challenge in many areas (Munoz-Melendez et al, 2021). Researchers propose therein improvements to the best implementation of the federal legal framework for pollution regarding plastics (Lara et al, 2020).…”

A Real-World Scenario of Citizens’ Motivation and Engagement in Urban Waste Management Through a Mobile Application and Smart City Technology

“…Getting older the knowledge and skills acquisition methods lose this element but, it remains one of the most effective ways to learn. Because it looks easy, it motivates us to participate, it generates experience, and it is pleasant [ 55 ]. Ethical rewarding—as stated before [ 41 ], people often simply want to know that they do the right thing.…”

An Empirical Investigation on Plastic Waste Issues and Plastic Disposal Strategies to Protect the Environment: A UAE Perspective

“…The Coca-Cola green rewards app is a mobile web application designed for Coca-Cola recycling plants and all plastic bottle collectors and agents. The app allows bottle collectors to quickly inform agents about accumulating garbage that needs to be picked up, which encourages more individuals to join in plastic bottle collection because it is a simple and successful technique [68][69][70].…”