Initiating and sustaining household plastic waste recycling: evidence from personal norm and self-efficacy interventions in Western India

Unrecycled plastic waste presents a critical environmental and climate challenge, and the IPCC has identified promoting recycling behavior as an important policy lever. However, evidence on the long-term effectiveness of recycling interventions in general, and particularly in the Indian context, is limited. This study reports the results of a 38-week field experiment conducted in western India assessing the sustained impact of two internal-motivation-targeting interventions on household plastic recycling behavior. While the self-efficacy intervention group showed a significant 12.14% long-term increase in the propensity to recycle, the personal norm intervention group showed a 22.14% increase. The interventions combined informational and communication elements with structural measures, such as increasing collection frequency from biweekly to weekly in the intervention groups. We also provide indicators of scalability, cost-benefit, and effect attribution across intervention components, interpreted with due caution. The findings offer actionable insights for designing recycling behavioral intervention policies in resource-constrained contexts.