We are on a collision course. 

I’m not talking about climate (though there is that). I’m talking about plastic waste. Here’s what I mean: 

  • Many chemical companies are spending billions of dollars to create chemical recycling facilities, which will take hard-to-recycle plastics as a feedstock to be converted into new plastics that are of virgin quality (find a good overview from 2024 here). All of these chemical recycling facilities need plastic waste to feed into their process — a LOT of it.
  • As I noted in my last post, five states in the U.S. have already enacted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation and eight more states have proposed it. Though every state’s approach is different, at the end of the day, all EPR laws are geared towards keeping packaging materials out of landfills (typically via improved recycling rates) and requiring manufacturers/brands to take steps towards making that happen. However, companies can only do so much to make their packages recyclable (or compostable). If the user of the product and package doesn’t get the material into the right bin so it can be recycled (or composted), the whole thing falls apart. So we need more people to put their materials — especially plastics — into recycling bins.
  • And therein lies the collision: Chemical companies need the material, and states are demanding that material gets recycled, right about the time consumers have largely given up on the recycling system. As of 2025, 32% of people in America no longer believe that what they put in the recycling bin actually gets recycled. Back in 2019, only 14% of Americans were unbelievers. 

We have to turn this around. That means changing attitudes and behaviors. Both are hard, but we have learned several things over the years that can help: 

  1. Avoid the urge to “educate.” It’s not that folks don’t need to be told what things go in which bin. It’s that most people — 68% here in the US — think they know everything they need to know about how to recycle properly. Now, that’s not true: Our ongoing testing of specific packaging materials and questions about “which bin does this go in” shows we have a long way to go for folks to properly recycle. They think they’re great recyclers, so campaigns that tell them they’re not, or campaigns that encourage them to recycle more just because it’s good for the environment, aren’t going to cut it. People think they’re already doing what needs to be done, so it will fall on deaf ears. 
  2. Instead, you have to motivate them. And how you do this is to lean into principles of behavioral economics. Social proof and loss aversion are two powerful frames that have worked effectively for ERM Shelton in the past (you can see a great example of both at work here). Most of us don’t want to be outcasts (social proof), and our brains react much more powerfully to the idea of losing or wasting something we have than to gaining something new (loss aversion). And if your mom ever said, “you’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” she was right. Humor gets attention and makes people feel good … yet in sustainability we often launch campaigns that are very serious, which causes people to turn away.
  3. Show and tell. Our Canned Good campaign was created to communicate the story of the infinite recyclability of the steel food can in order to drive preference and sales for canned foods. The campaign ALSO improved belief in the recyclability of other materials. We showed a lot of footage of items actually being recycled in addition to telling people about it. Showing items being recycled has a way of convincing people that recycling actually works. Sometimes clear is better than clever. 

So if we want to get off the collision course and engage folks into recycling, we need to stop trying to educate them about what they think they already know. Instead, we need to be funny, leverage principles of behavioral science and show people what we’re saying. It works!