Host: Japan Society of Material Cycles and Waste Management
PET bottles as a recyclable source have been collected separately by local governments in Japan. For efficient PET bottles recycling, the users are encouraged to complete cap removal, label removal, washing bottles and crushing bottles with respect to PET bottles.However, the quality of collected PET bottles is always bad because some of PET bottles are unwashed, caps and labels are not removed, and other wastes are mixed.The authors considered such bad quality was caused by psychological reasons. This means that the users feel unwillingness to do such recycle-friendly actions like cap removal and it discourage the users from completing the actions. The authors developed a new method to evaluate unwillingness which people feel when they complete recycle-friendly actions. In this paper, unwillingness of cap removal, label removal, bottle washing, bottle crushing, and their combined actions were reported.In conclusion,People feel stronger unwillingness when they complete several recycle-friendly actions together than one by one. Unwillingness of several actions shows accelerated increase rather than simple additivity of unwillingness. This psychological effect should be considered when PET bottle collection system, in particular requested actions to the people, is designed.
