Habit and skill retention in recycling

Abstract

From 2002 to 2004, New York City ceased collecting residential glass and plastic recycling due to city budgetary pressure. We use data on recycling rates in New York City, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in a difference-in-differences (DID) research design to determine whether this exogenous pause weakened previously formed recycling habits. Despite a 50% decline in the overall recycling rate in 2003, by 2005 the overall recycling rate had fully recovered. Our results suggest that recycling habits are persistent in the short term and that the loss of previously established recycling habits and skills are not an unintended harm of pausing a recycling program. We show that these results hold in the standard DID approach, as well as a synthetic DID approach modified to estimate time-disaggregated treatment effects separately, which eliminates pre-trends and improves the precision of our estimates.