By 2030, those tiny little bottles of shampoo and conditioner you find in hotel rooms will be a relic of the past in the European Union, along with sauce packets in restaurants and plastic wrapping for luggage at airports.
On 4 March, members of the European Parliament and EU member states finalized the packaging regulation, which is part of the European Green Deal. The packaging regulation is one of several intervention areas aiming to increase circularity of plastics in Europe, specifically reducing microplastics, ensuring packaging is reusable and/or recyclable by 2030, and a regulatory framework for biodegradable plastics. The regulations set goals to ensure all packaging in the EU is recyclable by 2030, as well as reducing overall packaging waste by 5 percent that same year.
As recent reporting by The Guardian revealed, the plastics industry has been aware that recycling plastic is effectively impossible for decades, despite publicity campaigns encouraging people to reduce, reuse and recycle. This is due at least in part to the existence of thousands of different kinds of chemical combinations in the various forms of plastic, and the need to sort it very carefully: all plastics cannot be recycled together.
Another factor is that some plastics begin degrading after one or two uses, causes the release of microplastics which are increasingly prevalent worldwide and the health risks they pose are only just beginning to be understood.
In addition to the polluting nature of plastic products at the end of their life cycle, the vast majority of plastics are made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels, making them a major challenge to overcome in order to help mitigate worsening climate change.
Research from the field of Environmental Psychology suggests that such EU-level regulations could be effective because policy and context are equally important in influencing how sustainably we are able to behave in our daily lives.
In her PhD thesis, “Context matters: Three ways of how the context influences recycling behaviour”, our former colleague Josefine Geiger’s research looked into reasons why people may or may not recycle, and found, among other things, that packaging itself can influence people’s willingness to do so.
“A packaging design that focussed people on the environment stimulated recycling, particularly among individuals with moderately strong to strong biospheric values, and particularly when novel designs were used.”
The importance of easy access to recycling facilities when it comes to people’s environmental behaviour cannot be underestimated. “The easier individuals perceived the collection system to use, the more feasible they perceived recycling to be, which led to more recycling.”
In her widely cited and wide ranging review article, “Psychology of Climate Change”, our colleague professor Linda Steg highlighted the necessity of system change in promoting society-wide climate action, and the role of policy in helping those system changes be accepted by the general public.
She identified four factors which can impact public acceptability of system changes: perceived costs and benefits of system changes, distributive fairness, procedural fairness, and trust in responsible actors. In the context of EU policy calling for cutting out plastic or excess packaging, public trust in the integrity of the responsible actors (i.e., whether they are believed to be transparent and honest) is a necessary condition for public acceptance.
Julia Koch’s recent paper, “Circular consumption to reduce environmental pressure: Potential of behavioural change in the Netherlands”, explores the extent to which people are willing help decrease waste production levels, increase their own reusage of products and how much they are already doing so.
Koch and her fellow authors found that realistically estimating how much potential any give action has depends on two things: how much environmental benefit results from a certain circular behaviour (described as ‘theoretical reduction potential’ (TRP), and behavioural plasticity: “the share of consumers who are not yet engaging in the behaviour but would be willing to do so if circular goods and services [were] easily accessible and affordable.”
The circular consumption behaviours that had the highest behavioural plasticity were those around “prolonging product lifetimes and purchasing more sustainable product alternatives, but these behaviours tend to have a relatively small TRP.”
As for policy implications, Koch’s paper calls for behavioural plasticity to be taken into consideration as a tool to identify behaviours that are relevant for research and policymaking.
Governments on the local, national and EU level can show leadership and clearly signal that environmentalism is a priority to them by coming up with “a clear vision and consistent policy to promote sustainable behavior”, according to professor Steg in an interview with The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO.
“Policy makers and industry also underestimate people’s willingness, and as a result, everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else, while better enabling more sustainable choices requires everyone to take action at the same time: government, businesses and industry. Only then can existing systems change.'”
