July 2016 - Parks & Recreation - 34

Designing recycling receptacles
with clear language, strategic
color choice and smaller holes to
encourage correct sorting greatly increases the likelihood that
visitors to a park or recreation
facility will recycle appropriately.

Design Is Key to Making Recycling Work
By Alec Cooley

result of our " on-the-go " lifestyles is the increased consumption of beverage
containers and other recyclables outside the home. In response to this trend,
more communities are introducing recycling bins to parks and other public
locations where these items are consumed. Besides capturing recyclables
otherwise destined for the landfill, these communities are motivated by the potential of
public-area recycling to reinforce the same behavior in the home and other settings, as
well as the ability to project a positive community image to visitors.
Any park manager knows, however,
that collecting recyclables is not simply a
matter of setting out bins. Beyond capital and operational expenses, there is the
significant challenge of getting people to
use the bins properly. Cans and bottles
can end up in the trash and worse, recycling bins can contain so much trash that
recycling companies won't accept the material. The take-away message for some is
that people aren't willing to recycle.
Research and the experiences of many
communities indicate the opposite is true.
Given the opportunity, most people are inclined to recycle. The larger lesson should

32 Parks & Recreation

be that recycling outcomes are aligned to
predictable design and management inputs
like any other facility operation.
While the 15-20 percent of people shown
to have strong environmental beliefs will go
out of their way to recycle an item correctly, multiple studies have demonstrated the
key to getting most people to recycle is to
remove the two greatest barriers that prevent them from doing so: confusion about
what to recycle and lack of convenience.
Research conducted by Keep America
Beautiful (KAB) in 2009 showed only
12 percent of surveyed public locations
had infrastructure to recover recyclable

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items. This lack of recycling opportunities is reflected in a separate national survey KAB conducted in 2013, in which 92
percent of respondents said they recycle
at home while only 19 percent indicated
that they typically recycle in public parks.
Confusion over what and how to recycle is caused in part by the ever-increasing
types of packaging and the tendency of
each community to independently define
what items will be accepted and how to visually identify a recycling bin versus a trash
bin (e.g., color and signage). The result is
that people have to constantly relearn what
and how to recycle wherever they go.
This confusion is compounded by a
human characteristic both obvious and
widely underappreciated: discarding waste
items is neither a priority, nor the primary
focus of most people's attention. This insight is critical to understanding and influencing whether a person correctly places
an item in a recycling or trash bin.

July 2016 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of July 2016 - Parks & Recreation