Blog: Understanding Consumer Recycling Behavior, by Joe Franses, Sustainability Director at Coca-Cola Enterprises

At Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), we talk a lot about moving beyond the four walls of our operations to influence our broader value chain.  We do this not only to reduce our own impacts but to explore new ways to create positive change on broader societal issues. 

We are focused on unlocking innovation and collaboration with many partners to solve today’s tough issues because, quite frankly, none of us can do it alone and we will rely on each other to create new answers to existing challenges. 

This is a big focus of our sustainability plan, and today we’re testing how this approach can begin to tackle recycling.

We sell 12 billion bottles and cans every year across Europe.  Each one has an implication for our resource usage and for our carbon footprint – around half of which is in our packaging. We are determined to keep those bottles and cans in circulation, to be recycled and reformed into new bottles and cans again and again.  And we’ve made some significant investments in areas like PlantBottle and new recycling infrastructure. 

But we need to do more.  Even with the best reprocessing facilities available, we rely on consumers putting plastic bottles into the recycling bin to make the journey of the bottle a circular one.  To do this, we must influence consumer behaviour to improve the recycling rates for drinks packaging, specifically in Britain and France.  When the CCE recycling team goes out to festivals to talk to the public about recycling, the positivity and support we see is heartening.  Research we commissioned with YouGov supports this, with nearly three-quarters of respondents across Great Britain and France stating that they always recycle plastic bottles.    

Yet recycling rates of plastic bottles in these two countries remain at around 50 per cent.  So, despite professing strong pro-environmental values around recycling, consumers are not translating these values into action. 

Why not?  In collaboration with the University of Exeter, we launched yesterday a project called Recycle for the Future, which will both explore and attempt to overcome this ‘value-action gap’.  At its heart is an innovative new research programme which works directly with families in their homes.  Over a period of five months, each household will keep a diary of their recycling behaviours and have regular in-depth conversations with a specialist researcher about their relationship with the packages and materials that come into their homes. 

The researchers will seek to understand how these materials travel into and through the household, and how family members make decisions about whether or not to recycle them.  In this way we hope to unlock the ‘black box’ of the household and understand what actually shapes consumer recycling behaviour in the home. 

From this initial partnership, we will then extend our collaboration by sharing our findings and working with the sustainability community and wider industry to innovate – to create wholly new solutions that can change the way consumers behave when it comes to household recycling. 

The Recycle for the Future research project will use collaboration and innovation to identify ways that we, and other consumer goods companies, can protect the resources we all share. 

Let us know your thoughts and get involved by contacting me on twitter:  @joefranses