More Recycling Messages

Fear Message:

Fear-inducing messages are used to influence an audience’s behavior. An effective fear message has four main components: it has to illustrate a real risk for negative events; it is likely that this negative event would happen if a behavior isn’t adopted, it’s likely that the event won’t occur if the behavior is adopted, and there are specific steps to adopt the behavior.

This image is an example of a fear-inducing message meant to influence people to recycle paper. The image shows a lot of trees that have been cut down, illustrating a possible negative event. It is likely that more trees will get cut down if people don’t recycle because of our need for paper. It is also likely that recycling paper will reduce the number of trees being cut down because paper can be made from recycled paper. The image also tells you what behavior to adopt to help prevent deforestation, which is to recycle.

Peripheral route processing:

This message is an example of a message designed to create peripheral route processing. The image is brightly colored and has a lot of distracing elements. The dragon tells the viewer to recycle newspapers, plastics, glass, and aluminum. This creater of this message has designed it in hopes that it would cause the audience to want to recycle without having to really think about the message.

Two-sided message:

This message is two-sided because it tells the audience what to recycle and what not to recycle. It allows people to really think about recycling and how they can fit it into their life. It is a neutral message because it tells people that there are somethings that can be recycled and somethings that cannot.

Recycling Advertisements

Classic Conditioning messages:

Classic conditioning is a technique that is used when trying to communicate a message. The communicator pairs a behavior with a stimulus that produces a positive response in the audience causing the audience to produce a positive response to the behavior. The two following images are examples of classic conditioning messages encouraging people to recycle.





The first image pairs the recycling symbol with an image of a happy planet. The second pairs the recycling symbol with the image of a cute penguin. Both of these images produce a positive response in the audience, making the audience care about the planet and animals. Both messages make the audience feel like they are doing something good for the Earth or for animals when they recycle.

Another type of classic conditioning is intensity. This image uses intensity to encourage recycling. The image uses many brightly colored recyclable materials to spell out the word “recycle” in big letters. The intensity of the image makes it stand out helping the audience remember the message that the image is trying to communicate.

Credible Messages:

Messages that one might consider credible are messages where the communicator is someone the audience either considers an expert or trustworthy.

Both of these messages come from sources that people gernally think are trustworthy. The first one is a message from NASA, saying "NASA recycles" the second one is from Mid Coast hospital and it says "we recycle." Both messages would encourage people to recycle because the viewer mioght think "Austronuts and Doctors recycle, maybe I should too."

A Brief History of Waste

Many people have the mistaken belief that the accumulation of trash is a recent phenomenon. Since people have been around they have accumulated waste. In the past, many different cultures have been concerned with how to deal with human waste. Ancient societies, such as the Greeks, had even developed landfills and rules about the disposal of waste. However, before the Industrial Revolution trash was mostly compiled of organic materials that decomposed easily and other materials like fabrics and metals were often reused. During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century materials became more available and people started to throw away items that were previously difficult to obtain and often reused. As the human population and human waste increased, area available for garbage disposal decreased. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s that the United States government developed waste management laws and companies began to encourage recycling by buying back recyclable containers. In 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated, drawing attention to environmental issues such including recycling waste. Now, many people are aware of the environmental problems we face due to are carelessness with trash. Still, waste is a huge problem with our society. According to the EPA, the average American generated 4.62 pounds of waste per day in 2007.


The development of new technologies has helped to increase our harmful waste output. Technology has made many products more readily available making it unnecessary to reuse and the development of plastics and other manmade materials has caused human waste much less biodegradable. Human waste has also become less environmentally friendly due to new cleaning products and chemical processes which are toxic to the environment.


Along with the development of Earth Day there have been many campaigns to raise awareness about our effect on the environment. The 3R (reduce, recycle, reuse) campaign is an example of a huge campaign that brought awareness to the waste problem in America. The recent “Go Green” campaign has also help to bring attention to our trash output. However, these campaigns have little immediacy; the United States continues to be the most wasteful country in the world. Only about 10% of our garbage gets recycled. One of the most successful approaches to encourage recycling is the bottle deposit laws implemented by some states. Currently 11 states have placed a deposit on beverage containers, Oregon being the first to do so in 1972.


Some technological advances have been made to help reduce and recycle waste. The development of waste sorting plants has helped to reduce the amount of recyclable goods that find their way into landfills. This development helps to make up for people’s carelessness, but is not nearly as effective as the conscious effort to reduce waste.




More information about waste:

http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/index.htm

http://www.nrc-recycle.org/

http://www.ct.gov/dep/cwp/view.asp?a=2690&q=322434&depNav_GID=1639&depNav=