Once you drink the water out of a bottle or unbox a new phone, where do you put that trash? New research from the University of Georgia found your choice likely depends on how “nice” that trash is.
Over the last 20 years, manufacturers have reduced the thickness of plastic bottles and the weight of cardboard packaging to reduce cost and waste.
It’s been a boon to companies’ sustainability programs and waste-reduction efforts, but new research from the UGA Terry College of Business department of marketing found that people are less likely to recycle lightweight — flimsy — waste. In some cases, lightweight packaging was 92% more likely to end up in a landfill than its beefy counterparts.
“Things that are lightweight — if they feel flimsy, if they feel low quality — there’s an assumption that they don’t have value,” said Sarah Whitley , assistant professor of marketing and co-author of the waste study. “There’s a feeling of, ‘I don’t really feel bad about whatever this thing is. It’s OK to toss it. It feels like trash; it is trash.’”
Lead author Lyndsay Loomer worked in brand marketing for a beverage manufacturer in Texas before earning her doctorate from Terry and joining the faculty as a marketing lecturer. She remembers when her firm introduced lightweight “crinkly” bottles to reduce plastic use in the late 2010s.
Research showed consumers had no problem buying the lighter-weight bottles, but she wondered what happened after customers got them home.
“As I became more familiar with sustainability literature, I thought if the package feels low quality and like trash — what if they’re more likely to throw it away?” Loomer said. “Then we’re kind of shooting ourselves in the foot, right?
“It’s related to this idea of waste aversion. We don’t want to get rid of things that we feel have more useful life or value. And we infer a lot of that through the material properties — the weight or feel — of whatever item it is. Even if we don’t actually go on to reuse it, we imagine it has too much value to just get thrown away.”
What followed was a deep dive into what people threw away and when.
“When you look at disposal behavior, it’s not enough to just have people indicate how they will dispose of an item,” Whitley said. “You have to see if they’re actually going to do it. Everyone says they’re going to recycle because there’s a lot of social desirability bias there. We had to have evidence of people doing it.”
Loomer started by supplying water at a department function, providing lightweight and standard bottles of Dasani water to find out which were trashed and which were recycled.
The lightweight bottles were more likely to end up in the trash.
Later, Loomer and research assistants emptied the trash bins on the first floor of the UGA Business Learning Community complex, coding and sorting the types of trash they found.
The average density of plastic containers in recycling bins was 60% more than those in the trash bins. In fact, each gram per fluid ounce of density measured increased the container’s chance of being recycled by 9.86 times.
They found similar results with heavy and light paper bags, flyers and envelopes. But the researchers also found they could curb the trashing of flimsy materials by reminding people of the materials’ inherent value.
The researchers increased the likelihood a low-quality envelope would be recycled by 52% by marking it with the statement, “You may be done with this envelope, but it still has value.”
For manufacturers, Loomer and Whitley’s study offers guidance as they continue to meet sustainability demands.
Saving material and shipping fuel through lightweighting might seem like an easy lift, but it becomes a form of greenwashing if companies aren’t concerned with the end of a product’s lifecycle, the researchers said.
“Material lightweighting seems like a good idea on the surface because 1) People don’t really care about it so much from a buying perspective. 2) It lowers costs, and 3) It’s sustainable,” Whitley said. “But manufacturers need to think one step further.”
“If we’re not examining the downstream consumer implications of manufacturing changes, we’re not going to move forward in terms of some of these sustainability goals,” Loomer concluded.
The study was published by the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
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