Office Paper Recycling: A Function of Container Proximity

The experiment reported here served as a thesis submitted by the first author to the graduate school at the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master's degree. These data were first reported at the 18th annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis, May 1992. We gratefully acknowledge Barbara Etzel and Keith Miller, thesis committee members, for their editorial assistance, and Jill Young for obtaining interobserver agreement measures. We investigated the effects of proximity of containers on pounds of office paper recycled and not recycled by 25 employees. During a memo and central container condition, one container for recyclable paper was provided; in a memo and local container condition, desktop recycling bins, announced by memo, were successively introduced across administrative, office, and instructional settings using a multiple baseline design. Only 28% of paper was recycled in the central container condition, but when recycling containers were placed in close proximity to participants, 85% to 94% of all recyclable paper was recycled. Follow‐up assessments, conducted 1, 2, 3, and 7 months after all settings received local recycling containers, showed that 84% to 98% of paper was recycled. Providing desktop recycling containers was a cost‐effective procedure with long‐term maintenance and program survival.