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Behavioural Insights Projects

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Recycling of Plastic Beverage Bottles when Away from Home

General Information

Project description

Encouraging a more circular economy to lessen the impacts of climate change will require behavioural changes from Canadians. In partnership with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), we have launched a program of research to help meet some of Canada’s recycling targets—90% collection rate for plastic beverage containers, and these containers to have 50% recycled plastic content by 2030. This research will use insights and approaches from behavioural science to understand and increase Canadians’ recycling of plastic beverage bottles, with a focus on when Canadian’s are away from home.

Analysis Plan

Pre-analysis plan: Is there a pre-analysis plan associated with this registration?

Yes

Hypothesis

Container type and the state of the container will influences people's disposal decisions

How hypothesis will be tested

Participants will be assigned to one of three container conditions: empty, 50% liquid, or crushed. Within each condition each participant will see 6-7 different container types: pop bottle, water bottle, juice bottle, paper cup, plastic cup, styrofoam cup or TetraPak (this is not shown in the liquid condition as it is completely opaque).

Dependent variables

The main dependent variable will be the disposal decision (garbage bin vs. recycling bin). A secondary dependent measure will be confidence in decision on a scale from 0-10. Exploratory reaction time will be collected through the online survey platform as well.

Analyses

Perception of which bin the item should be disposed in (garbage or recycling). This will be evaluated using a binary logistic regression with container type and condition included as predictor variables.
Confidence in their disposal decision (on a scale of 0–10). This will be evaluated using a mixed-model ANOVA with the between-subject factor of container condition, and within-subject factor of condition type.
Reaction time (RT): Exploratory measure. Will investigate Qualtrics’ RT of “first click”, “last click”, and “page submit” to see if any are viable measures of task RT, and then whether there are any interesting trends in RT.

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Canada

Toronto

Who is behind the project?

Institution: Privy Council Office
Team: Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU)

Project status:

Pre-registration

Methods

Methodology: Pilot experiment, Survey
Could you self-grade the strength of the evidence generated by this study?: 4
Data collection: Have any data been collected for this project already?: Some or all of the data have been collected, but the research team has not had access
Start date: 09/20/2023

What is the project about?

Policy area(s): Environment, Recycling-Reusing
Topic(s): Consumption- Purchase behaviour, 一 Other

Date published:

26 November 2023

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