Participation in curbside recycling schemes and its variation with material types

Ryan Woodard, Marie Harder, Matthew L. Bench

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Local authorities throughout the UK are refining or implementing curbside recycling schemes as they attempt to achieve challenging statutory recycling targets. Despite the importance of curbside schemes there are few published studies that have reported on actual measured levels and frequency of participation by residents, hindering transferability of lessons learned nationally and internationally. This paper reports measurements and analysis over at least four weeks for three different curbside recycling schemes operating in England, with at least 1400 samples in each. It is found that the participation rate is higher in schemes that collect more types of materials. Participation rates of 38%, 49% and 65% were measured for schemes that collected 1, 2 and 3 material types, respectively. The increase appears to be related not only to extra participants setting out the additional materials, but also increased participation for the common materials. It is found that for one scheme, more households tend to set out plastics and cans compared to newspapers.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)914-919
Number of pages6
JournalWaste Management
Volume26
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2006

Bibliographical note

This is a post-print version of a paper which was published in Waste Management 26(8):914-919 (2006) DOI doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2005.08.009. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives
4.0 International License.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Participation in curbside recycling schemes and its variation with material types'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this