Experimental Design Details
This project consists of the design and implementation of a randomized field experiment targeting two neighborhoods of Osorno city, in southern Chile. Our intervention is administered in three stages. The first stage considers the implementation of a baseline scenario consisting of the provision of fixed recycling infrastructure/stations in two selected neighborhoods. One of these neighborhoods will be regarded as treatment, and the other as a control. In each neighborhood, there will be one container of mixed materials (i.e., plastics, cardboard, glass) and eight plastic bottle bins, totalizing nine containers per neighborhood and eighteen containers in total. This fixed infrastructure will be installed on the streets of the two neighborhoods, and a specific location of recycling stations will follow a systematic procedure that considers the division of each neighborhood into smaller areas (i.e., polygons). Thus, households will be linked to a particular recycling station through these predetermined zones. These zones will be defined by using the Thiessen Polygons tool on ArcGIS. At the beginning of this stage, households in either group will be provided with (plane) information about the availability of the fixed recycling system in their area. This will be done through a door to door campaign and, every two months, this information will be reinforced by using digital media, in collaboration with neighborhood councils. The baseline stage will be carried out for six months and, in this period, we will collect information on the amount of recovered plastic waste and the percentage of waste incorrectly sorted, with a temporal frequency of two times per week. In the 6th month, a household survey will be conducted in order to gather households’ characteristics, perceptions, and motivations about recycling, the amount of waste generated in the household, and the use of containers for recycling, among other variables. The second stage considers the implementation of the curbside recycling collection service in the treatment neighborhood, whilst the control neighborhood will remain with only fixed infrastructure. In this phase, there will be mobile and fixed infrastructure at the same time. This phase will take place for another six months so that the first and second stages altogether will be completed in one year. At the beginning of this stage, households in the treatment group will be provided with (plane) information about the availability of both fixed and mobile recycling infrastructure, while households in the control neighborhood will be provided with the same information they were given in the first stage. Information will be administered using the same protocol adopted in stage one. It is important to emphasize that the content of these messages is merely informative on the locations of recycling stations and which materials to recycle. The third stage, starting from month 12, consists of an information campaign targeting households in the treated neighborhood. This intervention consists of the provision of normative information appealing to personal norms. In contrast, households in the control neighborhood will be provided with the same (plane) information they were given in the first and second stages. To keep consistency in all stages of our intervention, a door to door strategy will be carried out at the beginning of this stage, followed by reinforcement messages every two months. Finally, an ex-post survey will be carried out at the end of this stage.