Would A Lottery Reward Make People More Likely To Recycle?

Last Updated on: 29th July 2025, 09:52 pm

Why don’t people recycle more? I suppose there are a lot of reasons. You need storage space for the bottles and cans as they pile up. It’s just too much work. It’s too time consuming. There’s little payback for the effort. Good citizenship is often disrespected or unpaid — so why bother?

Two trillion beverage containers are produced every year. Of those, how many are recycled? The answer may surprise you:

• 34% of glass bottles;
• 40% of plastic bottles; and,
• 70% of aluminum cans

What might make people seek a recycling refund more frequently?

A new study may have an answer. Results suggest that, if people who recycle were entered into a periodic lottery, the numbers of recycled items would increase exponentially.

Why is that? Human nature is why — we love a chance to win!

To increase recycling rates, fifteen countries, eleven US states, and twelve Canadian provinces have bottle deposit refund systems. Typically, a small sum of anywhere from five cents to forty-five cents is added to the price of each beverage sold. That amount is refunded when consumers return the empty container for recycling. The efficacy of seeing your neighbor recycle, which is a prosocial behavior, is frequently reproduced, even in situations where good citizenship is not expected.

So what happens when a real incentive to recycle is in place?

Human Behavior: A Key to Enhanced Recycling

Humanity has a shrinking window to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet climate action is still lacking on both individual and policy levels. Do you remember from your Intro to Psychology class the term “operant conditioning?” It’s a behavioral tool that has real potential to promote collective climate action. One research study looked at an operant conditioning framework that uses rewards and punishments to shape transportation, food, waste, housing, and civic actions. This framework highlighted the value of reinforcement in encouraging the switch to low-emission behavior, while also considering the benefit of decreasing high-emission behavior to expedite the transition.

Another study investigated whether there was a more efficient incentive strategy to encourage reusable cup usage than the current policy of a 25-cent fee on disposable cups. The researchers wanted to examine if a lottery approach, a 5% chance to win a $5 credit, influenced the perceived likelihood of using personal reusable mugs compared to the current policy. How would lottery-based incentive strategies, compared to the current policy, influence the perceived likelihood of bringing personal reusable mugs?

A between-subjects survey presented participants with hypothetical scenarios reflecting the current policy and lottery approach. Results indicated no significant difference in perceived likelihood between the regular and low-reward lottery approaches.

A third study really coalesced into a practical solution to the plastic crisis. Say the current bottle recycling system offered a few cents return per item, and that system didn’t seem to be working too well. How about rethinking the meaning of each empty bottle and can, so that each is more like a lottery ticket? Would the thrill that comes with the moment you realize you’re holding a winning lottery ticket make a difference to recycling percentages?

That’s what a team of researchers in Canada wondered, so they put it to the test. They thought about classic decision-making where there is a low probability to win high rewards. In such a probabilistic scenario, there would only be a relative 0.01% chance of getting $1,000 per bottle — or a 1-in-10,000 chance. They conducted three pre-registered field and lab studies with 975 total participants.

Which would participants prefer: the probabilistic refund option — “bottle lotteries” — or the certain option?

The 2025 study, titled “Probabilistic refunds increase beverage container recycling behavior in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada,” was published in the periodical, Waste Management. The results revealed a lot about human nature. It turns out the idea of taking a chance at an unlikely but substantial financial return gets people much more excited than engaging in a certain and mundane pattern of behaviors. They brought 47% more bottles to recycle when the probabilistic refund was offered — these schemes led to recycling rates of 78.3% on average.

Participants felt more satisfied about the opportunity to get money when they chose the probabilistic refund option. Team member Jiaying Zhao, an environmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, didn’t realize how delighted participants would be with their decision. “What did surprise me was that people feel much happier about the chance to win a large cash prize, and, even if they didn’t win, they didn’t feel less happy at the end,” Zhao expressed, as quoted in Anthropocene.

The term to describe this feeling is “anticipatory happiness,” and it can be a key to increased recycling across demographic groups. Norway is a good example. It has had the world’s only bottle recycling lottery system, and it’s been in place since 1997. The numbers don’t lie: 97% of all bottles and cans are recycled in that country.

The lottery-recycling relationship has real practical implications for informing recycling policies and programs and increasing recycling behavior. A bottle lottery could increase the proportion of people who recycle — not just make current recyclers more diligent. It’s important to note that this probabilistic recycling program has no extra costs to local governments.

Final Thoughts about a Recycling Lottery

A study published this year in the journal Nature estimates the volume of nanoplastics, which are even smaller than microplastics and invisible to the naked eye, to be at least 27 million metric tons in North Atlantic seas — more than the weight of all wild land mammals.

Marine litter consists of human-made items that have been deliberately discarded, unintentionally lost, or carried by winds and rivers into the sea or on the shoreline. The plastic component of marine litter is termed marine plastic litter and makes up 80% of litter found in the ocean. These items impact the ecosystem, the organisms that inhabit them and potentially humans who consume these organisms. Ingestion, smothering, or entanglement has been reported for a wide range of organisms, including fish, seabirds, reptiles, mammals, and coral reefs. Most plastics are not readily biodegradable and, therefore, persist in the ocean for extended periods.

Of course, there are unanswered questions about what to do with the millions of tons of recyclables sitting in landfills.

In August, representatives of more than 100 countries will gather in Geneva for the final meeting of the United Nations’ effort to tackle global plastic pollution. Perhaps insights into human behavior will help to guide their decision-making as they attempt to reconcile the dominance of plastics in everyday life with the consequences of plastic consumption.