Giving Compass' Take:

• Katherine Martinko at TreeHugger reports on researchers conducting experiments to see if getting people to think about the products made out of recycled material could motivate them to actually recycle more and waste less.

• What can large corporations and companies do to become more sustainable and recycle friendly? What can we do in our own homes?

• Here’s how small U.S. cities are fighting to save recycling. 

Jeans into insulation, plastic bottles into coats – details like this make people more inclined to use the blue bin.

When you throw something in the recycling bin, do you ever stop to think about what it could become? And when you do, does it make you more inclined to use that recycling bin, instead of lazily tossing an item in the trash? Several consumer psychologists designed a study around these questions, in an effort to determine whether or not explaining to people what their recyclables are transformed into would help boost recycling rates.

As you may already know, recycling rates are abysmal in the United States. An estimated 75 percent of U.S. packaging is recyclable, but only 30 percent actually gets put in the right place. (Of that, even less gets recycled, due to contamination, incorrect placement, low resale value, and, of course, limited facilities.)

The rhetoric around recycling tends to focus on guilt, wasted resources, how terrible a human you are for not doing more of it, and so on. This public messaging could also be driving the rise in aspirational recycling, or 'wish-cycling', when non-recyclable items get mixed in with recyclables in hopes that they'll be taken.

Read the full article about recycling rates by Katherine Martinko at TreeHugger.