The effective management of waste products is hugely important, especially as the global population grows, so being able to efficiently and accurately sort waste for recycling is a vital civic duty for people to perform. Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) propose a gamified approach to help people in a recently published paper.
The study saw participants play a game that had been developed by the UBC team, with the game providing life feedback on their sorting choices. As the players played the game, the quality of their sorting became noticeably better, with accuracy improving from 69% to 84% after just one run through the game.
Players, who were recruited from a university halls of residence, were then monitored for their real world sorting habits, and the researchers noticed a decrease in the number of items in the wrong bin, and an increase in compost weight.
“This immediate feedback increases recycling and composting accuracy over the longer term, both in the lab and in the field,” the authors say. “One of the big questions in psychology is how long do these effects last? Our biggest takeaways are the fact that immediate feedback works, and the effects last over time.”
Reducing waste
There has been a noticeable improvement in attempts to correctly sort waste for recycling, but even with this improvement, there are still many mistakes made. The team developed a simple sorting game, with four squares representing four different waste category for players to sort their waste into, with instant feedback given after each choice.
The team believe that the instant feedback is crucial in helping the players learn the correct procedure, and the results appear to bear that out.
The results from the research have already been taken on by the UBC Campus and Community Planning department to help orient new students into the correct recycling requirements on campus, with leaderboards and prizes helping to gamify the correct behaviors. The team believe the game could easily be applied off-campus however, and hope that in time it will be.
Check out the video below to see the game in action.
