Most people will do the better thing when it costs them nothing extra in time or attention. Almost every failure of recycling, reuse and repair is a design failure rather than a moral one.
The evidence is in every building with a bin room. Put the recycling next to the lift and the residents sort their waste. Put it behind a locked gate at the back and the same residents stop. Nobody changed their values on the way down the stairs.
Friction is most of the story
We discuss waste as though it were a question of conviction. It is mostly a question of distance, opening hours, and whether you can find out where to go in under a minute.
Somebody who wants to repair a kettle has to know that repair is possible, find a person who does it, learn what it costs, and decide whether the trip is worth it. Four steps, each of which can fail. Buying a new kettle is one step and it can be done from the sofa.
Three kinds of friction
- Findability. The service exists, but you cannot discover it unless you already know its name.
- Legibility. You find it and still cannot tell what it takes, what it costs, or whether it is open today.
- Effort. You know all of it, and the errand is still forty minutes you do not have.
Publishing can do something about the first two. The third belongs to whoever runs the service, and pretending otherwise is how good intentions turn into a leaflet.
Make the better option legible
JunkSpots exists because the information about disposal, donation and repair in a European city is scattered across municipal PDFs, out-of-date forum posts, and the noticeboards of shops that closed years ago.1 None of it is secret. All of it is tedious to assemble.
Gathering it in one place, in plain language, with the hours checked, removes two of the three frictions for anybody who was already willing. That is a modest claim. It is also one we can keep.
Legibility is the part most schemes get wrong. A council page will say that a facility accepts small electrical items and leave you to guess whether a broken lamp counts, whether the cable should stay attached, and whether a queue at ten on a Saturday is twenty minutes or two hours. Every unanswered question is a reason to leave the lamp in the cupboard for another year.
Do not make it a moral test
A great deal of writing about waste addresses the reader as a suspect. It assumes the problem is that people do not care enough, and it responds by trying to make them care more.
That is both unkind and ineffective. People care roughly as much as they always did. What changed is that the responsible option was allowed to become the inconvenient one, while the wasteful option was engineered to be effortless.2
So the work is not persuasion. It is removing steps.
What that looks like in practice
It means an address, an opening time, and one sentence about what a place will and will not take. It means saying plainly when a scheme is not worth the journey. It means marking each entry with the date it was last checked, so a reader can judge how much to trust it.
It also means writing for the person with a broken chair and twenty minutes, not for the person who has already read three books about consumption. The second reader is easier to write for and does not need us.
And it means being honest about the limit. We cannot shorten the walk to the recycling centre or make a repair cheaper than a replacement. Where the errand is genuinely not worth it we say so, because a reader who is sent on one wasted trip will not take our word for the next one.
None of this is dramatic. It is the ordinary work of a publication that has decided its reader has better things to do than research a bin.