The Can Challenge: Understanding the best ways to incentive recycling through a diffusion approach

Understanding the best ways to incentive recycling and improve the efficiency of waste practices is a key environmental, social and economic management problem that needs addressing. We search for solutions to this issue by implementing a field experiment with two incentive mechanisms (a piece-rate and a lottery-based systems) in three different locations; a residential, a workplace and a student environment. We model our experimental data with the Bass Model, which to the best of our knowledge has never been employed to analyse experimental data and to gather a deeper understanding of the diffusion process among individuals adopting the recycling service. Our results indicate a high degree of heterogeneity across our trial locations. Incentivising recycling can stimulate action by those on lower incomes through opportunities for income generation. By contrast, those in workplace environments engage with or without incentives, but the latter does seem to boost activity. Our study contributes to the literature by providing evidence on how to best increase public involvement through recycling and provides important insights for policy making to address this worldwide relevant issue.