SOLID-WASTE RECOVERY - A REVIEW OF BEHAVIORAL PROGRAMS TO INCREASE RECYCLING

Twenty-four Earth Days have come and gone and science is still concern ed with making our world more proenvironmental. Applied behavioral sci ence in particular has been very active in leading research efforts to develop interventions aimed at encouraging proenvironmental behavior. This article documented the labors of researchers who specifically ta rgeted recycling with behavior change programs. Twenty-seven articles describing 31 experiments were reviewed. The interventions in these ar ticles were categorized into antecedents (i.e., conditions introduced prior to the target behavior) and consequences (i.e., conditions prese nted after the target behavior occurred). Twenty of the experiments ma nipulated antecedant conditions as the primary intervention, 10 focuse d on consequences, and 1 used both. The general conclusion of the revi ew was that the years of effort have produced several successful inter ventions that showed promise for increasing recycling behavior. Unfort unately, though, very few of these interventions demonstrated response maintenance after being discontinued, a finding common for such inter ventions not only targeting recycling but behavior change in general. The discussion focused on the need for (a) interventions to motivate l ong-term changes in behavior and (b) interventions aimed at reducing t he amount of waste generated.