Are You Affected by Recycling Bias?

Kate Yoder explains recycling bias, the false belief that recycling is superior to all other methods of reducing landfill waste.
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It might be time to throw your preconceptions about recycling in the garbage. A decades-long effort to educate people about recycling has mostly backfired, according to new research.

The study, published last week in Nature Sustainability, found that an overemphasis on recycling has distracted us from better options for preventing waste. In open-ended surveys, Americans overwhelmingly named recycling as the most effective thing they could do to reduce trash in landfills, overlooking more successful strategies — such as generating less waste in the first place.

“Because we have a really hard time imagining what a different, non-disposal-focused system could look like, recycling seems like the best option, right?” said Michaela Barnett, an author of the study and a former civil engineering researcher at the University of Virginia. “And it is better than landfilling, than incinerating, than littering. But people really are defaulting to that over better options, because I think they really don’t see a way out of this system that creates so much trash.”

Read the full article about recycling bias by Kate Yoder at Grist.