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It's a strange kind of barrier to recycling – not a lack of willingness, but uncertainty about which bin something belongs in, which is enough to make some people give up and throw everything in the general waste.
A study by a company specialised in sustainable packaging found that around 40% of people in Spain don't recycle certain items because they're unsure which container they belong in – not because they don't want to recycle.
Faced with uncertainty, the default behaviour is to put the item in the general waste bin – which feels like the "safe" choice but means material that could have been recycled ends up in the residual stream instead, often without the person realising the impact of that choice.
The encouraging part of this finding is that the willingness is there – the barrier is information, not motivation. This is also where sorting technology downstream matters: even when household sorting isn't perfect, plants equipped with optical sorting can recover materials that end up in the wrong stream, catching some of what household uncertainty misses.
Get in touch with our team to discover how PICVISA's optical sorting and robotics solutions can fit your recycling operation.