How can waste be reduced

We selected a laboratory setting to conduct the workplace component of the research. Laboratories generate considerable waste, much of which is not recycled or reused due to contamination or infection risks Hossain et al. In addition, researchers working in laboratories often spend time in other workplace settings, such as offices. This makes laboratory workers interesting to study from a multi-context perspective: we can study their behavioral consistency between laboratory and office settings within the workplace, as well as across the three broader settings of workplace, home and holiday.

They were at different career-stages in several disciplines biosciences, engineering, earth sciences, medicine. A convenience sample was recruited from amongst the authors' contacts, ensuring a balance of gender, seniority and discipline. Interviews lasted for around 30 min, were audio recorded and thematically coded using an inductive approach Braun and Clarke, Interviews were semi-structured and intended to elicit prevalence, drivers and barriers in respect of waste reduction behaviors at work, with a particular focus on labs.

Participants were recruited through academic email lists and snowballing asking colleagues working in laboratories to send on to others. Table 1 shows the sample composition. Most participants were from the UK and were early-career researchers working in universities. TPB variables were measured as follows.

All responses were made using a seven-point scale from Strongly disagree 1 to Strongly agree 7. Responses were on a seven-point scale from Strongly disagree 1 to Strongly agree 7.

Contextual variables included demographic variables Table 1 and the following. Yes 1 , No 0 , or Don't know omitted from analysis. These were: Does your organization have a policy to encourage recycling? All means, standard deviations SDs and correlations are shown in Appendix 1 in Supplementary Material. We outline here the main findings from the interviews, with exemplar quotes. All names reported are pseudonyms to protect interviewee confidentiality. Interview findings indicated a inconsistency between workplace contexts and between home and work; and b a range of barriers to and drivers of recycling in the workplace.

In relation to the former, interviewees indicated that recycling is less common in labs than in offices, due for example to fewer recycling facilities in labs than in offices and more concern about contamination risks see below. Furthermore, waste reduction at work more generally was less common than at home for various reasons, including not feeling responsible at work for dealing with waste:.

But here I shouldn't really say it, but there's just so much waste anyway, you don't feel as responsible for it I suppose. Several others also noted a lack of responsibility for reducing waste. For example, Roger Engineering stressed that it is not something that can just be tacked onto somebody's workload; it would probably take up much of their time so would have to be a set role with sufficient time allocated.

Others admitted they and colleagues did not always recycle or reuse items because of the effort involved and availability of single-use items:. I must admit that we don't always put them through the recycling.

Consistent with this, a variety of contextual physical, organizational, informational barriers to waste reduction were mentioned by interviewees. These included: unclear rules, lack of bin labeling, collection infrequency, limited storage space, limited awareness of facilities, health and safety regulations, actions by cleaners, and sterilization cost. In relation to health and safety rules, for example, Wendy Earth Sciences noted that she was limited in how many boxes she could keep for re-use as they posed a fire hazard.

A common theme was a lack of recycling facilities; this included infrequent collection where facilities did exist:. Concern was raised by three respondents in two departments: Earth Sciences and Engineering regarding rumors that cleaners tip recycling bins in with general waste, undermining individual efforts to sort waste:.

And it's not their fault … The fact that it's a blue bin doesn't mean anything to [the cleaners] […] I get it; the cleaning staff are busy, they're late, they've got tons of rooms to deal with. The most commonly cited reason for not reusing or recycling items was risk of contamination of both experiments and waste streams , mentioned by nine of the ten interviewees.

In other cases, contamination risk was left to individual judgment and most adopted a precautionary approach:. Conversely, interviewees also mentioned some drivers of waste reduction. These included pragmatic factors, such as availability of supporting facilities or cost reduction.

For example, several participants noted that some items could be reused at work by pooling equipment, where relevant schemes had been implemented.

People have no idea how much their tubes cost or how much the little cups cost… There's always a supply, but they have no idea how much these things cost. Other drivers of waste reduction were more normative or cultural, including personal values, habits from home , social norms, and organizational policy or colleague encouragement.

As the following quotes illustrate, waste reduction was viewed positively and normatively:. There are moral issues with it—being wasteful when you don't have to be is wrong. The combination of these pragmatic and normative factors was identified by one interviewee:.

It's what we're supposed to do. It's the social thing isn't it. Partially I think. The thing to do now. Consistent with this, the strength of recycling habits is higher at home than at work or on holiday Figure 2A and participants reuse a larger proportion of items at home than in the lab Figure 2B. Furthermore, different materials are recycled in different locations, including within the workplace laboratory vs. Figure 1. Figure 2. A Strength of recycling habit across settings 7-point scale.

Figure 3. Percentage of different materials recycled across settings there was no option to indicate that materials were not used at all. Figure 4 shows the significant correlations between the behaviors measured within and across settings see also Appendix 1 in Supplementary Material for non-significant correlations.

Almost all waste behaviors are significantly correlated, although the strength of relationships varies considerably. Similarly, holiday recycling is related not only to domestic recycling but to all domestic waste behaviors.

Figure 4. We conducted step-wise regression analyses of recycling behavior across three contexts lab, home, holiday , which enabled us to observe how much additional variance is explained over and above the TPB model 1 when adding knowledge and contextual variables model 2 , and also identity and personal norm model 3. As shown in Tables 2 , 3 , different, but overlapping, predictors are relevant in each setting.

In laboratories, recycling is marginally predicted by attitude model 1 and pro-environmental identity model 3 , while other predictors are non-significant. In the home, perceived behavioral control and knowledge are positive predictors, while attitude is a negative predictor in the full model. For holidays, perceived behavioral control, facilities, and personal norm are positive predictors.

The results suggest that both contextual factors e. Our model of household recycling appeared to provide the best explanation of context-specific recycling of the three models, despite the additional explanatory variables included in our model of workplace recycling to anticipate differences between behavioral control in the workplace and other contexts.

Finally, consistency across contexts was explored by calculating an absolute difference score between the percentage of waste recycled at home and in the workplace lab , and between home and their last holiday.

This score was then used as a dependent variable in a linear regression with pro-environmental identity as predictor to determine to what extent pro-environmental identity explains cross-context consistency.

Our qualitative interviews showed that attitudes to recycling are largely positive, though there are barriers e. Indeed, the survey reinforces this finding, with contextual and control factors recycling facilities, PBC at least as important for predicting recycling as individual motivational or normative factors e.

However, there were different predictors across contexts: Home recycling was predicted negatively by attitude, and positively by PBC and knowledge; Holiday recycling was predicted positively by PBC, recycling facilities, and personal norm; and work recycling was marginally positively predicted by pro-environmental identity.

Overall, the TPB did not provide a sufficient explanation for recycling behavior in any location: social norms were not significant in any context, perhaps because recycling is now relatively normative, particularly amongst highly educated groups, such as the population we studied here cf. Schultz et al. On the other hand, other non-TPB factors, such as recycling knowledge and personal norm, were found to be significant. The regression analysis shows attitude becomes a negative predictor when knowledge, PBC and recycling facilities were added to the equation.

This negative role of attitude in home recycling is unexpected and difficult to explain. However, one possible explanation is that the inclusion of both knowledge and attitude creates an over-controlled model Wooldridge, Therefore, it is possible that the negative effect of attitude is a way in which, when controlling for the practical aspects—what, where and how to recycle—more abstract views about recycling do not always translate into recycling but the opposite cf.

De Young, Once variation in recycling due to recycling-knowledge is accounted for in the model, the remaining variation due to attitudes alone may represent only an abstract positivity toward the idea of recycling, and this abstract positivity may tend to increase to the extent that a participant does not actually engage with the reality of daily recycling.

Indeed, we found few significant predictors of recycling at work, perhaps because there are strong institutional factors that impede the translation of TPB factors or other measured predictors into individual action by laboratory workers: such institutional factors are indicated by the interviews e.

Future research should therefore not assume TPB is equally valid across contexts and in particular should employ more organizational models cf. Our regression analyses also included variables not found in the TPB, which previous research indicated could improve upon a TPB explanation of waste-reduction behavior.

Notably, we found personal norm to be a significant predictor of recycling on holiday, perhaps because motivation and ability to be pro-environmental on holiday tend to be lower than in everyday contexts Barr et al. This is also consistent with the significant correlations observed between holiday recycling and all domestic waste reduction behaviors, suggesting those doing more waste reduction at home are the ones that take these habits on holiday.

It would be interesting for future research to explore whether other models, such as the Value-Belief-Norm VBN model—which posits that personal norm is the proximal driver of pro-environmental action—would work better than TPB in certain contexts, such as on holiday. Consistent with expectations and the prior literature e. All domestic waste behaviors recycling, reuse, reduce were related; and both workplace behaviors recycling, reuse were related.

Across contexts, the picture is more mixed: while recycling across the three contexts was significantly correlated, home and lab reuse behaviors were not. Holiday recycling, however, was significantly related to all domestic waste behaviors not only recycling. Together, these findings suggest there are more barriers to waste reduction recycling and reuse outside the domestic context than within it; and that contextual factors e.

At the same time as there being considerable variation across contexts, though, we also see heterogeneity across behaviors: recycling is more common than other waste reduction behaviors consistent with other UK-based research, e.

Domestic recycling has been the focus of much environmental campaigning and of environmental psychological research for many years, and it is now widely practiced Whitmarsh, , but other waste reduction behaviors are less well-known and may be more difficult for individuals, due to structural constraints e.

Where policy measures have promoted these other behaviors, their adoption has increased, notably in the case of carrier bag reuse Poortinga et al. We tested whether pro-environmental identity was a significant predictor of cross-contextual consistency in recycling, and found that it was not. This is in contrast to most spillover models e. Future work should explore other possible mediators for situational spillover, such as self-efficacy Nash et al. The study highlights that both individual factors e.

It may be that no single model e. Similarly, the practical implication of these findings is that no single solution exists to improve waste reduction across diverse contexts, such as home, workplace and holiday settings. Indeed, there are also likely to be different measures required within each context to address different forms of waste reduction, including recycling, reuse and reduction behaviors.

Recycling requires different forms of intervention or support e. This study adopted a mixed-method design, but did not undertake longitudinal or experimental analyses to ascertain causal pathways between behaviors. Further work is needed to explore whether one behavior e.

Our research also relied on self-reported recycling behavior, rather than observed recycling. Previous research shows these are positively correlated Huffman et al.

Our measures could also be improved and expanded. For example, we asked about reuse of items in the home but there may be wide interpretations of what this applies to e.

Laundry soap, shampoo, dish-washing detergent, dry pet food, cat litter, and other non-perishable items are great examples. For food, buy the largest size you can use before spoiling. Buy items in bulk, in concentrate, or in refillable packages. Bulk candy, for instance, will have much less wrapping than a bag of "Fun Size" candy bars.

Reduce Toxicity Whenever possible use nonhazardous or less hazardous materials at home and work. Other safety tips include: If you do use hazardous materials, use only what you need.

Share leftovers with neighbors or donate them to businesses or charities that need them. Read product labels and follow all directions carefully.

Reuse Bags, Containers, and Other Items Bring your reusable shopping bag to the grocery store and beyond. If you do have single-use bags, use them again! Bring a reusable mug to the coffee shop. Bring reusable take-out containers with you to restaurants it saves them money! Pack lunches in a reusable bag with reusable food and drink containers.

Reuse containers and other materials for storage and crafts. Reuse single-sided printed pages for scratch paper. Find new homes for clothing and linens, or use them for rags, patchwork, and other projects. Lawn and Garden Learn to compost at home.

Use food scraps, yard trimmings, and other organic wastes to create a compost pile. Adding the compost you make to soil increases water retention, decreases erosion, and keeps organic materials out of landfills. Raise the cutting height of your lawnmower during hot summer months to keep grass roots shaded and cooler, reducing weed growth, browning, and the need for watering. If you need large lawn and garden equipment such as tillers and chainsaws, you can reduce waste and save money by setting up a sharing program with your neighbors.

The clippings will return nutrients to the soil instead of taking up space in landfills. Donate healthy plants that you want to replace to community gardens, parks and schools. If you have a wood burning fireplace, save your ashes instead of throwing them away. Once cooled, wood ashes can be mixed into your compost heap and provide nutrients to your garden.

Home Improvement Use insulation made from recycled paper, glass, and other recovered materials. Clean and properly store tools, toys and outdoor furniture to protect them from damage and keep them out of landfills.

Turn off or unplug lights during the day. Doing so will save energy and help your lights last longer. Storms can cause power outages.

Prevent waste by keeping rechargeable batteries for your flashlights. If you do use disposable batteries, reduce hazardous waste by buying ones with low mercury content.

When moving, use old newspapers to wrap fragile materials. Use moving boxes with the highest content of recycled paper and bubble wrap containing recycled plastic. Be sure to recycle packaging materials after your move. Many organizations, such as U-Haul, have places where you can drop of unused boxes for others to reuse.

Look for household hazardous waste collection days in your community to properly dispose of cleaners, paints, automotive supplies and other hazardous items. For cleaning chores, buy reusable mops, rags and sponges. Tips for Students and Schools Students, parents, and teachers can all make a difference in reducing waste at school.

Green School Supplies Think green before you shop. Many items can be reused or recycled. Purchase and use school supplies made from recycled products, such as pencils made from old blue jeans and binders made from old shipping boxes.

Keep waste out of landfills by using school supplies wrapped in minimal packaging, and buying in bulk when possible. Save packaging, colored paper, egg cartons and other items for arts and crafts projects. Look for other ways that you can reduce the amount of packing that you throw away. Maintain new school supplies. Keep track of pens and pencils. Make an effort to put your things in a safe place every day. This will not only reduce waste, but save you money in the long run.

In the Cafeteria If you bring your lunch to school, package it in reusable containers instead of disposable ones. Remember to recycle your cans and bottles after you finish eating. Work with your teachers to set up a composting program at school. Make posters that remind students what can be composted or recycled.

Tips for Work Engage and motivate your coworkers to buy green products and help reduce waste. In the Office Instead of printing hard copies of your documents, save them to your hard drive or email them to yourself to save paper. Make your printer environmentally friendly. Change your printer settings to make double-sided pages. Pay your bills via e-billing programs when possible to save paper.