Delivery and impact of household waste prevention intervention campaigns (at the local level)

Abstract

This paper presents one strand of the findings from a comprehensive synthesis review of policy-relevant evidence on household waste prevention. Understanding what is achievable in terms of local household waste prevention intervention campaigns enables policy makers, local authorities and practitioners to identify optimum approaches to deliver effective behaviour change. The results of the evidence have been assembled and are discussed in two contexts: (1) the delivery of intervention campaigns as a package of measures used to ‘enable’, ‘engage’ and ‘encourage’ householders to change their behaviour; and (2) the impact of local household waste prevention intervention campaigns in terms of tonnage data. Waste prevention measures adopted include home composting, reducing food waste, smart shopping, donating items for reuse, small changes in the home, reducing junk mail and using cloth/reusable nappies. In terms of diverting biodegradable municipal waste from landfill, the biggest impacts can be attributed to food waste prevention (1.5 kg household^{— 1} week^—1) and home composting (2.9 kg household ^—1 week^—1). Projects providing a package of other waste prevention interventions have shown a very wide range of impacts: a broad indication is that such a package could achieve around 0.5 to 1 kg household^—1 week^{— 1} reduction at source. Disaggregating which waste prevention measures influenced uptake is generally not possible, but the evidence suggests that this does not matter: behaviour change has been supported by integrating a range of intervention tools and campaign promotions which have made a collective rather than isolated difference: it is a collection and an accumulation of measures that will have impact.