Experimental Evaluation of Environmental Manipulation to Increase Composting Behavior

The amount of landfill waste produced on university campuses is a significant problem that can be reduced by composting restroom hand paper towels discarded as trash. Recycling research suggests that environmental manipulation strategies may increase composting behavior. We used a multiple baseline across settings experimental design, in which treatment phases are sequentially applied across three restroom baselines to identify treatment effects. When the waste bins were far from the compost bins (increased response effort), a statistically significant composting proportion of more than 90% occurred, averaging 36% above baseline levels. An average daily landfill diversion of over 100 paper towels can have a sizable reduction of landfill waste across approximately 200 restrooms on a mid-sized university campus. Response effort offers an easy-to-use intervention when barriers and benefits of the pro-environmental behavior are low. Additional research is needed to determine if response effort will address other non-sustainable behaviors and maintain the behavior.