OPINION: When borough-wide recycling performance stalls in a local authority area, the response is often predictable: improve the service, run a communications campaign and invest in better infrastructure. These solutions are vital, but can often happen in a disjointed, siloed way.
And they miss a crucial element, an understanding of how people actually behave.
Behavioural thinking helps bring service design, communications, and infrastructure together into a single, coherent approach. Unless recycling services are designed around real-world behaviour and how the brain works, their impact will always be limited.
One of the most widely used behavioural frameworks today, COM-B, developed by researchers at University College London, provides a practical way of understanding why people behave as they do and what needs to be in place for behaviour to change.
At its core, COM-B says that for any behaviour to happen, three conditions must be met: people must understand what to do and how, the service and environment should make it easy, and the behaviour must feel worthwhile, normal and habitual.
If any one of these is missing, recycling behaviour will be inconsistent at best.
Recycling performance isn’t driven by a single factor; it is the combined outcome of system design, service delivery and communication. A behavioural lens isn’t the answer to everything, but it helps to bring these together.
Here are five ways to do that.
1. Define the behaviour before designing the solution
Recycling strategies often begin with solutions: more bins, a new campaign, additional collections. What is frequently missing is a clear definition of the specific behaviours that need to change and the barriers that prevent them.
In practice, improving recycling usually depends on multiple small behaviours, not one big one. These include behaviours such as separating food waste, rinsing containers, taking recycling to the correct bin store, using the nearest recycling bin rather than the nearest bin or dealing with waste correctly when moving home.
Starting with a long list of all the behaviours that underpin recycling performance is critical. It allows teams to identify which behaviours matter most, which are already happening, and which are being blocked by the system. Only then can they be prioritised and addressed.
2. Design for real-world conditions, not ideal behaviour
Once behaviours are clearly defined, the next step is to understand the conditions in which people are expected to perform them.
Recycling services are often designed on the assumption that people act logically and rationally. In reality, most decisions are made quickly, guided by habit, convenience and emotion, often under time pressure.
Identifying what is happening at the moment people decide what to do with their waste is key. This includes identifying friction such as unclear instructions, inconsistent messages, dirty or overflowing communal bins, long walking distances or unreliable collections.
If the system makes the right behaviour difficult or unpleasant, motivation becomes irrelevant. Designing for real-world conditions means removing friction before attempting persuasion.
3. Join up communications with service improvements
One of the most common reasons recycling interventions fail is that service changes and communications are developed separately. Communications teams are asked to “drive behaviour change” without service changes, while operational changes are introduced on the assumption that residents will simply adapt.
In reality, neither works well on its own.
Telling residents to recycle more has limited impact if the service is inconvenient, unreliable or confusing. Equally, a well-designed service will underperform if people do not understand what has changed or why.
4. Use social norms carefully and credibly
When services and communications are aligned, social norms can strengthen behaviour change, but only when used carefully.
Social norms are the unwritten rules that guide how people are expected to behave. When a behaviour feels normal, visible and routine, people are more likely to follow it.
These principles work when they are believable and locally relevant, focusing on what people can see around them: behaviour in their block, their street, or their estate.
A generic statistic from a faceless organisation about improved recycling rates, on the other hand, is unlikely to work.
5. Treat recycling improvement as a continuous system: test, learn and adapt
Even when everything is joined up, recycling performance will not necessarily improve. Behaviour change is not a one-off event; it is the outcome of a system that adapts over time.
Too often, changes are implemented, messages are sent, and results are reviewed weeks or months later at a borough-wide level. By then, it is difficult to understand what actually worked or why. A behavioural approach helps introduce a continuous approach to change at a manageable scale by observing how people respond and continually tweaking the solution to changing circumstances.
Conclusion
Improving recycling performance is not simply a question of more infrastructure or more communication. It is about designing services that work with human behaviour rather than against it.
If recycling reforms are to deliver their full potential, behaviour change must be treated as a core part of service design, not an afterthought.
Find out more from communication, engagement, and sustainability professionals from across the waste and recycling sector at the Communications Conference on 5 February 2026 at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London.
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