The Effects of Item Dirtiness on Disposal Decisions

Recycling programs have significantly reduced the amount of waste sent to landfills, but recycling contamination rates have risen, reducing the environmental benefit of recycling collection. In this work, we investigate the prevalence of food-stained recyclable material contaminating recycling by evaluating disposal decisions of food-stained paper items. Consumers are more likely to contaminate recycling with food-stained items that have a low (vs. high) degree of dirtiness. We argue that consumers may dispose food-stained paper items into recycling out of a desire to avoid the anticipated negative feelings of not recycling. Consistent with this argument, we demonstrate that consumers with higher environmental values are less influenced by the degree of dirtiness of food-stained paper items and feel more negatively about not recycling food-stained paper items. We further demonstrate that disposal informational campaigns can reduce recycling contamination and increase composting by changing how consumers feel about recycling food-stained paper items.