Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

The January 2013 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology contained the results of two experiments that should concern anyone who embraces recycling as a means to preserve natural resources and promote a sustainable lifestyle. In the first, researchers asked study participants to evaluate a new product—in this case, scissors—by cutting up paper in various, preordained configurations. Half of the study participants did the evaluation in the presence of a trash bin, only, and half did it in the presence of a trash bin and a recycling bin. The results were troubling: those who performed the task in the presence of a recycling bin used twice as much paper as those who could only throw their excess paper in a trash bin. “This suggests that the addition of a recycling option can lead to increased resource usage,” wrote the authors, Jesse Catlin and Yitong Wang.