“A weekly doorstep recycling collection, I had no idea we could!”: Overcoming the local barriers to participation

Abstract In 1990 the UK Government introduced a ‘challenging target of recycling 50% of household waste by the end of the century’. However, the success of local authority recycling programmes is reliant upon the participation of residents in the services provided. Traditional approaches (including leaflet drops and newspaper adverts) to communicating local authority services to the public have generally provided long-term educational benefits without offering the necessary short-term gains required to achieve the UK recycling target. In an attempt to increase low public awareness and participation the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea decided that effective promotion, through a door-to-door communications strategy, was the only means available to increase recycling tonnage and public participation in their doorstep recycling service. The Recycling Roadshow was launched to bring the recycling service and its message of ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’ to every doorstep in the borough. This awareness campaign has increased average weekly recycling tonnage from 107 to 132 tonnes, and this success is attributed to greater participation resulting from the promotional activities of the Roadshow and more effective participation with residents recycling a greater range of their household materials. Clearly the Roadshow is a useful additional marketing tool, which conceptually marks a major rethink in the way that recycling is perceived, placing recycling at the heart of an integrated waste management strategy. The research suggests that this style of communication can form a central and cost-effective approach to raising public participation, and supportive data will be presented in this paper. The details of the programme, the Borough’s decisions prior to and during the implementation of this programme, its impact and long-term success will be analysed in more detail within this paper.