Why Recycling Bins Fail in Schools and Food Courts

Walk past the recycling bin in almost any school grounds or food court and you'll find it full of the wrong thing. It's not that people don't care. It's that traditional recycling asks too much of a distracted crowd. Here's why it fails, and what works better.

The problem with public recycling bins

Sorting waste correctly takes a moment of thought: what is this made of, and which bin does it go in? At home, people have time for that. In a busy public space, they do not. The result is predictable:

• Contamination. One person puts the wrong thing in the recycling bin, and the whole bin can be rejected and sent to landfill.
• Too many choices. Rows of bins with different labels overwhelm people who are moving fast, so they use whichever is closest.
• Crowds don't slow down. Kids at lunchtime, customers at a food court, patrons at a venue. None of them stop to read labels.
• Effort falls on staff. When bins are contaminated, someone ends up re-sorting them by hand, or the whole lot goes to landfill anyway.

The uncomfortable truth is that a recycling program can look good, with all the right bins and posters, and still recover almost nothing because the material is too contaminated to use.

The change that actually works

The fix is to stop asking the public to sort. Instead of putting out several bins and hoping people read the labels, you put out as few bins as possible, sometimes just one, and do the sorting afterwards, away from the crowd.

You can't make kids in a school playground sort their rubbish at lunchtime. So don't try. Let them keep it simple, and let the sorting happen properly afterwards.

When sorting happens after collection rather than at the bin, several things improve at once. There's no contamination problem, because there's little or no wrong bin to use. Far more material is actually recovered, because trained people separate it properly rather than relying on a distracted crowd. And staff stop wasting time re-sorting bins by hand.

Where this works best

This approach suits any space with a steady flow of people who can't be expected to sort: schools and school grounds, food courts, shopping centres, and entertainment and sporting venues. In all of these, the goal is a recycling result without pushing the effort onto the people passing through.

Proving the difference

One of the biggest advantages of sorting after collection is that you can measure it. We can report back on how much was actually recycled, which is great for schools and venues that want to show students, customers or councils the difference they're making, rather than just hoping the bins are doing their job.

Frequently asked questions