For more than a decade, The Recycling Partnership has worked alongside hundreds of communities, dozens of brand and producer partners, and policymakers in every region of the country to figure out what actually moves the needle on residential recycling. That work has covered curbside programs in single-family neighborhoods, multifamily housing, contamination reduction grants, behavioral research, and the design of engagement strategies that reach residents where they live.
The pattern that emerges from this body of work is consistent. Recycling doesn’t underperform because residents don’t care, nor because communities lack commitment. Local governments have spent decades delivering education and outreach with limited budgets, limited staffing, and limited ability to measure impact. Under those conditions, engagement efforts often become a series of individual campaigns rather than a sustained practice built around behavior change.
This article pulls together what 12 years of field evidence has taught us. It’s a record of what The Partnership has observed at the national level, where the current approach to education and outreach falls short, and what could be accomplished through a more structured way of engaging residents.
The System Is Underperforming at Scale
Our State of Residential Recycling Report in 2024 makes the diagnosis plain: 76% of recyclables generated in U.S. homes are lost to the trash. Every major material category is under-recycled. Seven out of ten cardboard boxes, three out of four milk jugs, four out of five steel cans, three out of four tons of mixed paper, and seven out of ten glass bottles, aluminum cans, and PET bottles never make it back into circulation.
The reasons are structural before they are behavioral.
- Only 73% of U.S. households have access to recycling.
- Among single-family homes, access reaches 85%.
- Among multifamily homes, it drops to 37%.
That gap means nearly 20 million multifamily households, about 63% of all multifamily homes in the country, are effectively shut out of the system before any conversation about behavior begins.
Where access exists, participation is far from automatic.
- Only 43% of all U.S. households participate in recycling.
- Of the 73% with access, only 59% use their service.
- Among those who do participate, only 57% of recyclable materials end up in the cart.
Our 2024 State of Residential Recycling Report also notes that public trust shapes participation. Residents who doubt that their recyclables are actually being recycled are less likely to participate.
The geography is uneven in both directions.
- Five states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska) have residential recycling rates below 10%.
- Only four states (California, Connecticut, New York, and Oregon) have rates of 30% or above.
- Eleven states (California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia) lose more than 1 million tons of recyclables each year, including states with relatively strong programs.
Our report estimates that comprehensive Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies for packaging and printed paper could push recycling rates above 60% in lower-performing states. California, Colorado, Maine, and Oregon are now in the multi-year process of implementing EPR.
The takeaway from this is not that recycling is broken in one place or one population. The same patterns of underperformance show up across geographies and program types: there’s missed access, inconsistent communication, fragile trust, and material loss at every stage of the residential value chain. The takeaway is that the system is consistently below where it could be.
How Education and Outreach Have Evolved
For years, the assumption was that better awareness would lead to better behavior. Using their limited budgets, communities printed brochures, mailed inserts, hung door hangers, ran radio spots, and posted on social media. The goal was straightforward: help residents understand what to recycle and they’ll recycle correctly.
But as more programs were measured, a different pattern emerged. Awareness alone rarely produced meaningful changes in participation, material capture, or contamination. Communities were doing important work to raise awareness, but limited resources often meant outreach was delivered through occasional touchpoints rather than sustained engagement strategies capable of influencing behavior at scale.
The next generation of work introduced behavior-informed interventions: cart tagging, in-person curbside feedback, corrective messaging tied to observed neighborhood behaviors, and contamination-reduction grants that pair instructional communication with operational support. These approaches outperformed awareness alone, and they did so consistently across geographies.
The most recent shift is system-level. The communities that are moving performance forward treat engagement, infrastructure, and program design as one integrated effort rather than as three separate workstreams. Carts and containers, hauler operations, materials recovery facility (MRF) capacity, communications cadence, and resident-facing feedback are coordinated. When any one of those layers is missing, the others underperform.
The trajectory is clear. Education and outreach have moved from awareness to behavior to system. The communities still operating in awareness-only mode are using a model that the field has already shown to be insufficient to achieve the needed recycling rates.
What 12 Years of Field Evidence Revealed
A consistent set of findings has emerged from our work, validated across program types, community sizes, and regions.
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Awareness alone does not move behavior.
Our 2023 Knowledge Report’s Recycling Confidence Index captured this directly: eight in 10 Americans say recycling is worth the effort, yet over half of household recyclables still end up in the trash. Intent doesn’t translate into action without the right system in place. The report drew on ethnographic research in 16 homes, more than 100 in-depth interviews, surveys of over 10,000 people across the country, and seven community pilots that reached 52,000 households.
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Layered interventions outperform single tactics.
On their own, a mailer, a short social campaign, or a one-time event produces small and short-lived effects. Larger and more durable shifts come from a combination of feedback, motivational and instructional communication, and program design changes.
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Structural constraints set the ceiling.
Local leadership capacity, program funding, collection, and processing infrastructure all set boundaries on what engagement can achieve. The best-designed campaign can’t compensate for a program without consistent collection or a multifamily building without service.
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Trust is a participation lever, not a soft factor.
Our Knowledge Report identified four conditions that must be true for widespread behavior change: systemic communications infrastructure, public confidence in recycling outcomes, engagement tailored to different audiences, and recycling systems designed with behavior in mind. None of these is rhetorical. Each one shows up in the performance data.
Field Evidence: Patterns Shown Across Communities
Here are examples that illustrate how these findings hold up across very different contexts. They’re drawn from a much larger body of program work.
Access Expansion
One of the most consistent findings across The Partnership’s fieldwork is that participation problems were often rooted less in residents’ willingness than in system accessibility itself. That finding surfaces differently across communities, but the underlying dynamic is the same.
In Omaha, Nebraska, households participated using small bins that limited capacity and created friction in the recycling process. Transitioning more than 144,000 households to automated collection with 96-gallon carts contributed to a 67% increase in recycling tonnage within the program’s first year. In rural Alleghany County, North Carolina, residents had lost practical access to recycling infrastructure altogether. Reopening a transfer station and removing sorting requirements restored simplified access to recycling for approximately 7,200 households. For the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the challenge was more foundational: creating reliable local recycling access where none previously existed, through a flexible drop-off system paired with community-centered outreach. In the rural Boston Mountain Solid Waste District in Arkansas, The Partnership designed a targeted digital advertising campaign across multiple platforms to test whether online messaging could draw more residents to two drop-off sites. The campaign reached a significant portion of the county and generated engagement metrics well above industry benchmarks, while also confirming that digital reach and real-world participation are not the same outcome, and that closing the gap between the two requires a behavioral layer that advertising alone cannot provide.
System Insight
When recycling systems become easier to use, understand, and access, participation increases. The work repeatedly demonstrates that residents are far more likely to recycle when systems are designed around real household behavior.
Contamination Reduction
Contamination was rarely the result of a single knowledge gap. More often, it reflected systems that lacked timely feedback, repeated reinforcement, or clear behavioral cues for residents. Over time, The Partnership tested different combinations of cart tagging, audits, mailers, in-home bins, and direct feedback strategies to better understand how contamination behavior changes in real-world curbside systems.
In Atlanta, Georgia, a multi-year project spanning all single-family households in the city combined cart-side feedback, data-driven outreach, and the Feet on the Street program. Contamination dropped significantly while participation increased, and the volume of bagged recyclables in the stream fell by nearly 80%. In Folsom, California, The Partnership tested whether layering multiple engagement approaches — digital advertising, mailers, cart tags, and community-led postcard writing — could move behavior in an already high-performing program. The group that received the full combination of tactics was the only one to see contamination drop, ending six percentage points below its baseline. Groups that received only one or two intervention types saw smaller, inconsistent gains. In Jacksonville, Florida, large-scale Feet on the Street cart inspections, paired with tailored messaging, reduced contamination by 21.7% and revealed participation gaps that required additional engagement. In East Lansing, Michigan, a high-turnover housing environment required more immediate behavioral feedback, resulting in a 24% reduction in contamination through targeted outreach supported by truck-mounted camera technology. In Springdale, Arkansas, layered mailers, in-home bins, and follow-up communications reduced contamination while increasing resident engagement. In Orange County, Florida, sustained cart-side feedback reinforced that material quality improves most consistently when communication is repeated over time rather than delivered as a one-time intervention.
System Insight
Contamination reduction is not solved through awareness alone. When engagement approaches reinforce each other across channels and over time, performance gains compound in ways no single tactic can produce. Sustainable improvement requires layered strategies that combine infrastructure, direct feedback, and repeated communication.
Multifamily Housing
Across The Partnership’s work in multifamily housing, a consistent pattern emerged: participation is constrained less by resident intent and more by how the system is designed and operated. Where infrastructure is incomplete, onboarding is inconsistent, or property operations are not aligned, engagement efforts quickly reach a ceiling. Nationally, only 30–40% of multifamily units have access to recycling at all.
In Orlando, Florida, a citywide ordinance established baseline requirements for multifamily recycling, but success depended on pairing policy with property-level support — including technical assistance, training, and outreach to help property managers operationalize service across thousands of properties. In Tacoma, Washington, the barrier was not access alone but whether communication reflected resident realities. Transcreated, culturally relevant materials developed through focus groups significantly improved the usability of recycling guidance across diverse communities. In Houston, Texas, a multi-property pilot is testing how different service models — centralized drop-off and valet collection — perform when paired with in-unit bins and behavior-informed outreach, with results intended to inform future system expansion.
System Insight
In multifamily settings, education and outreach only perform when supported by functional access and aligned operations. Access is always the precondition. System design is the primary driver of sustained participation.
Applying Education and Outreach to a Single Material Stream
The Partnership’s work to improve polypropylene recovery revealed another recurring pattern: even as recycling capabilities expand, behavior does not automatically change in step. Across multiple communities, polypropylene packaging had become recyclable within the system, but residents’ understanding had not kept pace with evolving acceptance rules. The challenge was no longer simply whether a material could be recycled, but whether households understood that system changes had occurred and trusted that they knew how to participate correctly.
In St. Peters, Missouri, targeted mailers and cart audits tested how residents responded to polypropylene-specific guidance, resulting in measurable improvements in correct sorting behavior following direct outreach. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sustained follow-up communications reaching more than 100,000 households supported increased polypropylene recovery over time, demonstrating the importance of reinforcement beyond initial awareness. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, expanded acceptance of expanded polypropylene was paired with coordinated mail, digital, and video outreach to help residents understand new recycling expectations and confidently adjust their behavior.
System Insight
Residents act when communication is specific, reinforced over time, and connected to clear system expectations they trust and understand. Awareness of a system change is not the same as confident participation in it.
The Emergence of a Structured Approach
Twelve years of testing have done two things at once. It has confirmed which interventions work and under what conditions, and it has shown the limits of approaching education and outreach on a community-by-community, campaign-by-campaign basis without a shared method.
Fragmented approaches are not bad, but they are insufficient at the scale and speed the system now requires. The current performance goals of communities, producers, and policymakers cannot be met one improvised program at a time. EPR implementation is moving from legislation into practice in four states, with more in development. Corporate sustainability commitments are coming due. And the underlying math, 76% of household recyclables are still lost to the landfill, leaves no room for engagement work that does not compound.
The field evidence pointed towards the need for a more structured engagement model that codifies what consistently works, defines the conditions under which each component performs, and gives community programs, brand partners, and policy implementers a common language for designing engagement that builds on itself rather than starting over.
That work accelerated in 2023 with the launch of The Knowledge Report, one of the most comprehensive efforts The Partnership had undertaken to study residential recycling behavior at a national scale. The research combined in-home observation across 16 households, more than 100 in-depth interviews, a national survey of 10,000 people, and field-tested engagement pilots reaching 52,000 homes. At its core were two questions: What does it take for people to recycle well every chance they get? And how do we close the gap between intention and action?
But the value of the research was not simply the scale of the study. It reinforced and sharpened what The Partnership had already been learning through years of direct implementation in communities across the country. The Partnership doesn’t study behavior from a distance. We are actively deploying carts, testing outreach strategies, running contamination reduction programs, piloting engagement tactics, measuring results, and refining approaches alongside local partners in real-world systems.
We know that most people want to recycle, but intention alone does not produce consistent participation. Recycling performance is shaped by system design — access, clarity, reinforcement, trust, convenience, and social norms working together over time. The report synthesized more than a decade of field implementation, behavioral research, contamination reduction work, infrastructure investment, and direct community partnership into a clearer understanding of how residential recycling behavior actually changes.
Over time, that synthesis evolved into what The Partnership now calls its Recipe for Community Engagement — an evidence-based framework shaped by repeated field application, measurement, iteration, and the recognition that recycling performance improves most consistently when infrastructure, communication, and behavior design operate as part of the same system.
Why This Matters Now
Recycling performance in the U.S. is no longer waiting on a single missing piece. The infrastructure gaps are mapped, the behavioral research is in, and the policy framework is in motion. What the system needs is a way to connect the engagement layer to all of it, with the same rigor that infrastructure and policy now command.
Over the past 12 years, The Recycling Partnership has worked alongside communities to test, measure, and refine what drives recycling participation. That body of evidence has shown that when communities have the right insights, sustained investment, and implementation support, participation increases, contamination declines, and more recyclable material is captured.
That work continues to grow through new investments like the Recycling Participation Fund, which expands The Partnership’s ability to help communities apply proven behavior-informed strategies alongside the broader portfolio of grants, technical expertise, and implementation support. Together, The Partnership’s grants, consulting, technical assistance, and the Recycling Participation Fund translate more than a decade of field evidence into practical solutions that communities, producers, policymakers, and partners can use to solve recycling’s toughest challenges and build stronger recycling systems.