Households across the English county of Kent in southeast England are taking part in a year-long research project to understand how communications messaging around recycling can help change behaviours and boost the amount of material going into the recycling system.

The 12-month project covers 673,000 households across 13 local councils in Kent – more than 1.5 million people – “to engage with Kent residents to understand if there is any confusion when it comes to plastics recycling and how we can encourage citizens to reduce, reuse and recycle plastics”, according to councillor Nick Kenton, chairman of the Kent Resource Partnership.

Led by UK plastics recycling organisation Recoup (Peterborough; www.recoup.org) the study, which started on July 1, is backed by a number of organisations including the British Plastics Federation (London; www.bpf.co.uk) and Plastics Europe (Brussels, Belgium; www.plasticseurope.org). Recoup received grant funding from Innovate UK (Swindon; www.gov.uk) to co-finance the project.

Recoup said the study was “the first of its kind to both deliver and measure over an extended period the impact recycling communications campaigns have on behaviour change. It is expected that the insights collected will provide evidence to support future plastics recycling engagement strategies”.

In December 2020, Recoup had published its UK household plastics collection survey, which indicated that a change in citizens’ lifestyles – working and learning from home, reduced travel and on-the-go food consumption due to Covid-19 – has led to a significant increase in the plastics recycling rate from household collections (see Plasteurope.com of 18.12.2020).