As the pandemic continues, we’ve not only seen increased awareness around recycling as a valuable and essential service, but the U.S. supply chain has increased demand for recycled materials to support American manufacturing of new products and packaging.
What better time to position the unique ways that #recyclingmatters than celebrating America Recycles Week this November? To help your community or workplace in this celebration, we compiled the top motivators for recycling based on our recent behavior change research and built a weeklong campaign, ready to deploy via your organization’s social media. Whether you post each day, schedule out the full week, or share/repost them directly from The Recycling Partnership’s Communities for Recycling Facebook and Instagram, don’t miss the opportunity to inspire participation in recycling across your community.
ICYMI Data-Backed Resources to Improve Your Recycling Program
While we at The Recycling Partnership are always expanding our content and resource library, America Recycles Week is the perfect time to inventory the unique needs of your community and how to best meet your residents where they are. Whether or not we’ve partnered on the ground to decrease contamination or expand equitable access to recycling – making it as easy for residents to recycle as it is to throw something away – we have free resources, guides, and toolkits to inspire, educate, and engage your community to recycle the right way for your program.
In case you missed it, here are some of the top community recycling resources, guides, and toolkits released in the past few weeks.
- Start at the Cart™: Key Concepts of Influencing Recycling Behaviors: This recycling behaviors paper examines what precedes resident’s recycling behaviors and our stage-gated process for planning behavior change tactics. Recycling behaviors need ongoing support but together, with infrastructure, education, and engagement we can influence better quality, more participation, and an increased amount of recyclables.
- Multifamily Recycling Guide and Community Toolkit: Whether your community is getting started in engaging multifamily residents or searching for new tools and resources, this guide and toolkit provides tested best practices and free educational resources to customize and leverage in your community.
- Personal Electronics & Battery End-of-Life Management Guide: With the holidays just around the corner, now is time to begin educating your residents about the proper disposal for end-of-life batteries and personal electronics. The free guide and educational assets leverage tested best practices to provide your community with the information and resources you’ll need to implement the most effective collection and management program available today.
- User Testing and Best Practices for Designing Educational Materials for Recycling Guide: When educating around what goes in – or doesn’t go in — a recycling container – messaging space is limited and attention spans are short. Through data from a two-part study, this guide uncovers what really helps people better understand recycling instructions.
Community Program Favorites
When you’re ready to update members of your community on what is and isn’t recyclable, you can use free resources like Campaign Builder and DIYSigns. The Recycling Partnership offers free, professional, easy-to-use online software for mailers, signs, design files, and image libraries.
- Campaign Builder: Create a better recycling education campaign with our free, easy-to-use online campaign builder. This tool lets you take the reins to customize your community’s recycling campaign. It’s as easy as answering five questions to customize your educational materials to help tackle even the toughest contamination issues in your community. Your new promotional materials will highlight what’s accepted for recycling in your program with your community’s name and contact information. And now, the newest graphics align with our free DIYSigns for Recycling.
- DIYSigns: Speaking of DIYSigns, you and your residents can use this free online tool to customize and download signage to show where and what discarded materials belong in the recycling container. Improve recycling where people across your community live, work, play, and learn by using this free Know What to Throw resource.
Has your community found unique and creative ways to engage residents for America Recycles Week? Share what you’re doing in your community in our Facebook City and County Recycling Coordinator Group.