IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0783.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does teaching school children about recycling reduce household waste?

Author

Listed:
  • Ek, Claes

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Söderberg, Magnus

    (Department of Sociology, Environmental and Business Economics, University of Southern Denmark)

Abstract

Reduced waste generation is a prioritized environmental policy objective in the EU as well as worldwide. We perform a randomized controlled trial in Sweden with school children aged 10-16 to evaluate an intervention designed to reduce household waste, Environmental Education Programs (EEP). Crucially, we are able to examine the causal effect of a wastethemed EEP on the actual waste generated in households where a child was treated. This is done by coupling the addresses of participating students with high-resolution address-level panel data on collected waste amounts, supplied by municipal waste authorities. Our design allows identifcation of the differential effect of the EEP on waste generation in treated versus control households. We fnd no signifcant evidence that the intervention had any effect on waste generation. There is also no indication that this null result is due to interference between treated and control students.

Suggested Citation

  • Ek, Claes & Söderberg, Magnus, 2020. "Does teaching school children about recycling reduce household waste?," Working Papers in Economics 783, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0783
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/63287
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Field experiments; Environmental Education Programs; household waste; intergenerational learning;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0783. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ann-Christin Räätäri Nyström (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/naiguse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.