Our Efforts To Change The Wilson Center Culture: Personalizing The Message

What I found at the Wilson Center (books, magazines and pamphlets in the waste, along with aluminum cans); Finding a way to communicate the value of recycling (supporting the day care center). Responses. 

It is easy, if anecdotal, to monitor recycling habits at the WilsonCenter because trash cans and recycle bins are in hallways, rather than in offices.

Walking the halls, the results — what materials make their way into trash and what into recycle—look very random.  I saw a lot of what I thought was recyclable material in the trash or, more often, empty recycle bins.

What trash do we generate at the Wilson Center?  What happens to it?

Wilson Center is a think tank.  People here research and write.  A lot of drafts get printed, reviewed, marked up and disposed.  Articles and previous research is printed, read and eventually tossed. The result is a lot of paper emerging from printers, and, eventually, product in the form of articles, magazines, pamphlets and books.

What happens to it? From an archeological perspective, people seemed to think that only “orderly” trash could go to recycle.  So, we saw some (but not all) white paper in recycle bins — but rarely colored paper or cardboard.  The publications department periodically culled their offices and offered old magazines and books to staff.  What was rejected was thrown into the trash, not to recycle.

Wilson Center is an important convening center.  Almost every public event – and there are between 3 and 5 a day, most days – serves some kind of food: pastries and coffee in the morning, sandwiches, salad and soft-drinks (in individual cans) at lunch, and cheese and crackers for late afternoon events.  Food is a big part of the Wilson culture.

We have an on-site dining room serving breakfast, lunch and special events.  Although the dining room offers glass and ceramic plates and bowls (and every scholar who comes to the WilsonCenter is issued a ceramic coffee mug) as well as typical take-away containers, food services typically create a lot of trash.

Recycling must involve WWC regulars, visiting scholars, and people who attend events, alike.

When we first decided to try to increase recycling rates, we spoke with long-time Wilson Center employees.  We learned that recycling has been tackled before and has always been a challenge. But folks were willing to try again.

The first try: reduce printing paper waste using well known opt-in/opt-out approaches

Our first step was straight out of behavior 101 – and so seemingly simple it is hard to understand why it wasn’t done before.  There are a lot of printers and they were all set to one-sided printing; it took affirmative action to move to two sided printing – to opt-out of single side.

Our big change:  the IT department moved every printer to a two-sided default.

Now, if a WilsonCenter employee wants one sided printing, it is possible.  But the person must affirmatively set printing to two-sided.

We thought about dedicating a printer to use only recycle paper (this would allow people who prefer to correct draft on one-sided printing to continue that habit).  But the IT folks were opposed; they said the embedded ink posed long-term problems for the printers.

Why didn’t we move earlier to 2-sided printing, a seeming no-brainer?  One reason was inertia. Another may have been fear of violent reaction from researchers set in their ways.

In fact, complaints have been very few.  Research assistants reported that only a small number of the scholars they supported demanded drafts printed one-sided. 

Our challenge at this stage is to figure out how we can monitor metrics beyond keeping track of paper purchases.

The tougher issue:  improve the rate of voluntary recycling

What about the harder task – encouraging people to put their recyclable materials into the correct bin?

We did a little homework.  Behavioral research tells us that distant goals, like saving the world or the environment, are rarely persuasive.  They are too big and diffuse for people to process.

People are more likely to change habits if they can imagine the results of their actions and feel personally connected.

We learned that the revenue from building recycling supports the building day care center (the Woodrow Wilson Center is only a small part of a larger complex that includes US Agency for International Development, some parts of EPA and a lot of other offices). Most regulars in the building are very aware of the day care center; some use it; others either know someone who does, or see the cute kids in the hallway.

We designed an email to send to everyone in the Wilson Center.  Instead of emphasizing save-the-earth type concerns, it focused on benefits for the day care center.  It did so with words, but more importantly, with a strong visual. We were very proud of ourselves.

I returned to pacing the hallways and checking waste bins.

Did we move the needle, and why not?

In fact, this announcement appeared to have only a small impact.  We continued to see a lot of recycling and trash mixed up in the bins. That said, we did not have a metric to measure the impact – the weighed recycle that benefitted the day care center included the entire building, not just the WilsonCenter.  So our impressions were just impressions and somewhat random observations.

And, we didn’t expect 100% returns.  All we wanted was a level of enthusiasm and improved delivery.

But we did talk to our WWC colleagues, and this is what we learned.

A number of people claimed they never received the announcement, even though it was sent out electronically to “WWC-all” and physically posted at the entrance to the café.  This probably means that a lot of people didn’t open it or read it – a function of busy professionals who tend to screen their messages and ignore what they deem not essential.

And those that did open it still remained confused about what could – and could not – be recycled.

My next post will explain what we did next.

A brief history of recycling

The good, the bad and the ugly; responses to scarcity; demonstrations of wealth.  War and patriotism.

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No wasteful packaging here: is this how you want to purchase your meat?

A typical street meat market in the Soviet bloc.

Recycling, in one way or another, is not new in human history.

Ancient peoples reused materials when virgin resources were scarce.

Even in resource rich 20th century America, everyone had a story about their mother or grandmother in the Great Depression when conserve, conserve, conserve was essential.
Journalist Teddy White’s autobiography describes pre-World War II China when “honey pots” were collected daily.  The valuable human waste was composted and used in agriculture.
Recycling became a patriotic virtue during World War II.   It was part of the war effort and promoted heavily.  Making the most of available resources was particularly important when the war made sea transport – and access to overseas resources — difficult.  Countries devastated by the war had no choice but to reuse what they had – an imperative that continued during the post-war rebuilding.
But recycling has not always been such a romantic and idealistic goal.
As I got involved with the countries of the former Soviet bloc, I learned the connection between recycling and hated scarcity and poverty.  And how the end of scarcity was celebrated in the form of attractive packaging and the heady experience of buying and having objects without the need to save or re-use.

It is worth thinking a little about that to understand why recycling might be a hard sell in some cultures and some societies.

Before the fall of the Berlin wall, consumer convenience was not a high priority in the soviet bloc. People stood in lines for hours to buy basic necessities.  Of necessity, they engaged in complex, time-consuming barter and trade.

Recycling was a form of survival. Citizens found as many uses as feasible for the things they owned, and did not discard items until absolutely necessary.

New nylon hose were just not available in the stores.   When women were able to find them, they made them last as long as possible, darning and patching them again and again.  After that, the material was applied to other uses.

As the region’s economic systems began to show greater respect for consumers, it was almost inevitable that there would be increased environmental impacts. Freedom from recycling became a significant side benefit of the changes that have taken place since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Soviet-era shoppers in Poland had no choice but to carry bags with them when they shopped –no shop would offer a bag. Not that there was anything to put into those bags: stores were empty and necessities very hard to find. And the folks behind the counter were not very polite.

Very soon in the economic transition, stores began to provide the simple convenience of plastic bags to carry groceries home.  This is the obverse of the somewhat trendy current US use of reusable shopping bags.

Disposable packaging is not just for decoration.

Often it provides basic hygiene. As the photo above demonstrates, in most of central and eastern Europe, meat (when available) was purchased from open air stalls, without any packaging.  It often got to those stalls simply stacked in trucks.  The meat on the bottom of the stack went bad very quickly.

More elaborate packaging might increase the amount of trash, but it also reduces food waste. More packaging meant that food and manufactured goods got from factories to the market place in better condition and with less damage.

And there must be a non-disposable alternative that doesn’t creep people out.

As late as the early 1990s, machines on the streets of Kiev, Ukraine dispensed beverages into common glasses.  The consumer was expected to rinse the glass and leave it for the next person. This system insults the consumer in several ways.  People are understandably horrified about shared glasses if they can avoid that.  They spread disease.  But they also send a singular message about the value of the person drinking the beverage.

It’s easy to understand why that disposable Starbucks cup — personal, clean, and germ-free –is so welcome.  And such a prestige item!  Carrying it, you feel just like Jennifer Aniston on Friends.

In the newly opened western-style fast food restaurants of Warsaw, Moscow, and Budapest, cups decorated with logos helped remind consumers that they have the discretionary funds and the opportunity to participate in the experience of buying soft drinks. When Burger King opened in Warsaw in late 1992, 15,000 customers went in the door on the first day.

Attractive containers are a source of pride, as is the freedom — taken for granted in the West — to discard them when empty.

Scarcity and recycling were put into stark perspective by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic.  In her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed she tells about watching a television interview with Fidel Castro in 1987.

Castro told the interviewer that he would not let his people have one car each, for ecological reasons.

It was early evening, the air was still hot, and sweat was pouring down my temples. But as Castro uttered that sentence, I shivered with cold. At that very moment, I detected for the first time in his words a frightening totalitarian idea in ecology — or better, the totalitarian use of ecology. He was asking his people to give up a better standard of living, even before they tasted it, in order to save the planet, to renounce in advance something that was glorified as the idea of progress. It seemed to me that asking for post-consumer ecological consciousness in a poor, pre-consumer society was nothing but an act of the totalitarian mind. We do live on the same planet, I thought, as his voice faded away, but not in the same world

21st Century America is not mid-20th Century Central and Eastern Europe.  But it would be foolish to disregard context – or to ignore the culture surrounding recycling.

Recycling will happen in poor societies because there is no choice.

In affluence, the conditions are different.  There is more to recycle but less incentive.  That is our challenge.

Conditioned to waste – hardwired to habit

Ruth Greenspan Bell

And Friends

Ruth Greenspan Bell is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Whether we like it or not, up to 45 percent of our daily actions are not decisions, they’re habits.

This necessarily affects our daily choices, like whether or not to recycle the many pieces of waste we create each day. Of course, socioeconomics, education, and policy all play a role, but the idea that humans are on auto-pilot much of the day is a topic ripe for exploration.

This series of entries follows a social experiment on social behavior and recycling, examining what we – me and my Wilson Center colleagues — learned as we have tried to improve recycling efforts in our offices here in Washington, D.C.  More fundamentally, it is about how to keep deeply ingrained habits from sabotaging our best intentions.

It is about the idealistic environmental goals we set for ourselves and how we can get there by harnessing knowledge about what makes people tick and deepening our understanding of human motives.

In other words, can insights from research on evolutionary wiring and prevailing culture help remove obstacles to resource conservation?  We say “yes.”

Sorting out the problem

So where do things break down?

Let’s take aluminum recycling as an example. The huge energy savings from re-use of high-value aluminum make a classic economic case for action.  Nevertheless, Americans recycle less than half the aluminum we use.  We are nowhere near the standard of Germany, where aluminum recycling rates are in the 96% range.

One challenge is basic information. One motivated recycler I know thought recycling centers would reject crushed cans. Others thought that if there was residue in the can, it had to go in the trash. Greater certainty about what recycling centers accept and reject could help improve overall performance.

Convenience and habit also play a large role. Recycling bins aren’t always available.  When they’re not, it is just easier to discard the item into the trash.  After all, how much difference can one can into the waste make?

What is the goal?

Recycling — retrieving things of value and making sure they reused – isn’t just about feeling good.  It is also about resources and money.

Again, aluminum makes the case.  You can see some statistics here.

•It takes 95 percent less energy to make new aluminum cans from used cans than making them from virgin ore.

•Recycling just one aluminum can will save enough energy to run a television for three hours.

The counterweight or habitual norm is that we Americans live in a one-use society – our morning coffee cup, the petroleum-based plastic that holds our take out lunch, our soft drinks and the endless bottles of water. The overall result is a gap between our intentions and our performance.

And yet, with recycling bins in most offices, parks and public spaces, the sight of a recycling bin permits us the belief that recycling is as a done deal, yesterday’s news.

Our experiment

Here at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, located in the Ronald Reagan International Center in Washington, DC, we took on a recycling experiment. It is a small part of a larger project partnership between the Woodrow Wilson Center and Columbia University.  The partnership seeks to demonstrate how insights from behavioral social science can motivate a wide variety of decisions, with the aim of making people, and society, less wasteful.

We think that if we can learn more about how to motivate recycling in our own office, we might gain insights into how to address other environmental issues like climate change or clean energy.

What we see by simply walking the Wilson Center office halls is that, in a motivated, highly educated think-tank, aluminum cans are as often tossed in the trash as in the recycle bin. And a lot of other valuable disposables generally ended up in the waste, as well.  Whole paper often goes into recycling (but not consistently), but smaller pieces of paper to waste. Until recently, the publications department put old books into waste.

Why? Habits.  Daily routine. This is not to say we’re automatons, but entrenched impulses wield a great deal of control and can act as barriers to change, even when we value that change. For the person who finished the soft drink, the goal at that moment was to dispose of it and to get back to work.  Maybe she knew that it would be better to find a recycle bin.  But it is a normal human impulse to find the easiest route and to move on. People have deeply engrained habits that oftentimes conflict with their good intentions, much less with what they know is best for humanity as a whole.

Because of this, we think that education and information is not the only challenge — although better understanding of what can be recycled is a part of the solution.

Can recycling be sold as part of building a better world? Turns out, people have a hard time connecting with far-out, somewhat abstract goals like saving the environment or protecting the world’s natural resources.  It is hard to connect our small recycling gesture with this vast picture of difficult challenges. Appeals to the big picture are more likely to fail.

Our living lab, the Woodrow Wilson Center

The Wilson Center has a core staff of about 140, and every year we welcome well over 100 resident scholars from literally every part of the globe

This is a highly educated bunch of people, many with advanced degrees, who care about the impacts of their actions.  Despite varying views and approaches, everyone comes to Woodrow Wilson Center with a desire to make a difference in the public policy dialogue.  And this isn’t the first time efforts have been made to ramp up recycling rates.

The Recycling Chronicles seeks to unravel the behavioral impediments to recycling so that more valuable materials enter recycling streams not landfills.

Stay tuned.  In addition to sharing what we are learning, we have already lined up guests who will share their experience as facility managers in big Washington, DC law firms, sustainability directors of universities, and insights from other countries. We look forward to hearing your thoughts as well.