Here’s a story that a reader shared with me a couple ofmonths ago. I finally figured out what I want to do with it. The reader sees it as a story about everyday citizens’ ignorance. But I think it reveals how we overestimate the importance of education and underestimate the power of peer pressure. Here’s the story:

I was walking through my subdivision in northeastern Illinois. It was a trash/recycling day, and noticed that a homeowner had placed several 4-foot fluorescent tubes (T12F40’s) in his recycling container on the curb (we utilize the least-common-denominator method: single-stream/commingle).Just then, the garbage/recycling truck turned the corner, so I decided to linger and confirm that the garbageman would reject the tubes.To my surprise, he threw them in the hopper with all of the other recyclables - glass, newspapers, and plastic. I approached him and asked, “You threw fluorescent bulbs into your recycling hopper??”He laughed and said, “Yeah, we do it all the time. We recycle everything!”

I asked the reader what they thought this story revealed, and they replied:

…it points to both carelessness and a broad lack of education - among consumers and haulers - in the recycling arena.

I disagree. Social and scientific research is most conclusive that educating individuals about environmental problems simply does not move many to participate in the solutions.

Doug McKenzie Mohr, dean of the “social marketing” movement, writes:

“While education and advertising can be effective in creating public awareness and in changing attitudes, numerous studies show that behavior change rarely occurs as a result of simply providing information.”

“Social or community context appears to be one of the key factors that can motivate people to take pro-environment actions,” writes the Roper Starch research firm in their 2005 report Understanding Environmental Literacy in America. “[O]ne of the most important determinants of behavior change is not information/education, but people’s beliefs about the pro-environmental behavior of others.”

Spitfire Strategies, in their study, Discovering the Activation Point, concurs, but puts it more succinctly, writing “it is more comfortable for most people to try something they have already seen someone else doing.”

If we apply the insights from these studies to the situation at hand, what would seem to be a better solution to increase the rate at which the refuse workers properly handle  flourescent bulbs?

• Schedule a workshop to explain to workers (one more time!) about the dangers of mercury in the bulbs and how to identify which ones are recyclable and which aren’t
• Create a public display in the refuse workers’ office that shows how most of the workers are properly sorting the bulbs out of the recycling — signaling to those who don’t that they are in a minority