New research by Icaro Consulting explores attitudes towards waste and recycling in Great Britain.

Whether the focus has been on ‘slop buckets’, microchips in bins or council ‘bin spies’, the topic of waste has occupied an unusually large number of media column inches. Amongst all of this heated and politically charged debate, what do the public think about all of this? Are households happy with their waste services? How do they feel about the trend towards Alternate Weekly Collections (AWC), or the introduction of food waste collections?

The results are based on an online survey of 2,019 adults in Great Britain aged 18+. The survey was designed and commissioned by Icaro Consulting, with survey fieldwork undertaken by ICM Research from 2nd – 4th September 2011.

The report is available to download below. Its job is simply to present the survey findings. If you would like to read additional commentary and interpretation of the findings, then please visit our partners on this project, Sauce Consultancy.

Attitudes to Waste and Recycling in Great Britain 2011 – Web

This research explored consumers’ reactions to the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). To understand both the EPC’s current role as well as its potential role moving forward, the research involved the development of stimulus materials to test reactions to different versions of the document in terms of both format and content. Key findings include:

• Energy efficiency currently plays a weak role in consumers’ decision making in the home buying process. While it seems a normalised part of trying to reduce running costs in situ in the home and for purchasing White Goods, this has not yet transferred to home purchasing.

• Recognition and general awareness of the EPC among home owners is relatively high, although this does not translate into either detailed understanding or home buyers taking action.

• Reactions to the EPC as it stands are largely negative, because of four main reasons: the length of the document; the language; the overall ‘look and feel’; and, for some, scepticism about the underpinning methodology.

• Participants’ reactions to alternative designs suggest that a range of simple improvements could usefully be made to the EPC in terms of both format and content.

To see the full research findings and recommendations, click here to go the Consumer Focus website

This new research, focused on understanding how consumers perceive and react to ‘green terms’, helped inform Defra’s revised guidance on the use of green claims (published in February 2011). The project involved a series of 12 focus groups (recruited in line with Defra’s environmental segmentation model) alongside an online survey of 2,000 UK adults.

The research finds that awareness and understanding of green language seems to be evolving rapidly. Previous research (e.g. Futerra, 2007) has suggested that terms like ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘energy efficiency’ are unfamiliar to most consumers and poorly understood, whereas this study – some three years later – suggests otherwise. For example, almost three quarters (74%) of survey respondents said they were either very familiar or fairly familiar with the term ‘carbon footprint’. Terms that have been in use for some time such as ‘recycling’, ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ were considered even more familiar, but the opposite was true for emerging terms that are relatively new, such as ‘zero carbon’ or ‘water footprint’.

The research also demonstrates the extent to which green terminology need to make intuitive sense to consumers. A good example of a common element of green terminology that seemed to cause confusion was the prefix ‘bio’ (which was at various times wrongly linked to washing powder, fuel, yoghurt and natural decomposition). ‘Neutral’ (as in ‘water neutral’ or ‘carbon neutral’) and zero (as in ‘zero carbon’ or ‘zero waste’) also caused problems, since consumers tended to infer from them a total absence of something. In contrast, consumers seemed to feel that ‘footprint’ was more intuitive as an indicator of impact.

The main research report can be downloaded here. It is accompanied by two supplementary ‘reference’ reports – listing the key findings for each individual term and label that was explored in the research.

This was a joint project between Brook Lyndhurst, Icaro Consulting and Sauce.

Research on consumer attitudes to green terms

Supplementary report on consumer responses to environmental labels

Supplementary report on consumer responses to specific green terms