Earth Notes: General Bibliography (radke2025probabilistic)

• [radke2025probabilistic] Radke, Jade and Argentopoulos, Stella and Dunn, Elizabeth and Zhao, Jiaying Probabilistic refunds increase beverage container recycling behaviour in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada (accessed 2025-07-09), Elsevier BV, 2025-08-01, Waste Management, volume 204, ISSN 0956-053X, doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2025.114954, article/pages 114954, also at (article) (BibTeX).
  abstract

  Of the two trillion beverage containers produced globally every year, most are not recycled. To increase recycling rates, the bottle deposit refund system has been proposed and implemented in some regions of the world with varying degrees of success. To improve the refund system, we leverage a classic decision-making phenomenon where low-probability high rewards are preferred over small certain rewards with the same expected payoff. Specifically, we turned an established certain but small refund for recycling beverage containers (i.e., 100 % chance of getting $0.10 per bottle) into a probabilistic one (e.g., 0.01 % chance of getting $1,000 per bottle) with the same expected payoff. In three pre-registered field and lab studies (N = 975 total), we showed that participants preferred a probabilistic refund option (0.01 % chance of getting $1,000) over the certain option (100 % chance of getting $0.10), felt happier about the opportunity to get money when they chose the probabilistic refund option, and brought 47 % more bottles to recycle when the probabilistic refund was offered. These findings highlight the value of probabilistic refunds in increasing recycling behaviour and provide theoretical and practical implications for recycling policies and programs.
  note

  [[**UA] Same may be applicable to energy saving with heat pumps: turn down thermostat today at the right time and sometimes win 1000x value to the grid rather than a few pence off a future bill?]