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Twenty-four Earth Days have come and gone and science is still concerned with making our world more proenvironmental. Applied behavioral science in particular has been very active in leading research efforts to develop interventions aimed at encouraging proenvironmental behavior. This article documented the labors of researchers who specifically targeted recycling with behavior change programs. Twenty-seven articles describing 31 experiments were reviewed. The interventions in these articles were categorized into antecedents (i.e., conditions introduced prior to the target behavior) and consequences (i.e., conditions presented after the target behavior occurred). Twenty of the experiments manipulated antecedent conditions as the primary intervention, 10 focused on consequences, and 1 used both. The general conclusion of the review was that the years of effort have produced several successful interventions that showed promise for increasing recycling behavior. Unfortunately, though, very few of these interventions demonstrated response maintenance after being discontinued, a finding common for such interventions not only targeting recycling but behavior change in general. The discussion focused on the need for (a) interventions to motivate long-term changes in behavior and (b) interventions aimed at reducing the amount of waste generated.

This article presents a case history of the development of an enforcement system for controlling environmental problems in an urban setting. It details a long-term effort to coordinate and refine the judicial and executive branches of local government to allow the effective application of consequences to manage environmental-code violations. Special emphasis is placed on how incorporation of behavioral principles resulted in a system that has become a model for communities throughout the United States.

Using a design that also permitted an assessment of the extent to which any increase in grass-cycling behavior diffused to the neighbors of treated participants, two types of commitment strategies for promoting residential grass cycling (i.e., not bagging grass clippings) were investigated. Baseline data were collected over a period of 4 weeks to determine which residents in each of three homogeneous neighborhoods bagged grass clippings for curbside pickup. A total of 558 houses observed to bag grass clippings during this period were included as participants in the experiment. Following baseline, the neighborhoods were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Results indicated that participants who made a commitment to grass cycle and to talk to their neighbors had grass bags present significantly less often than either the commitment-only or control participants. This effect was present during the 4-week intervention period and also was sustained during an immediate 4-week follow-up period and a delayed 4-week follow-up period 12 months later. There also was a diffusion effect in which the neighbors of targeted participants showed significantly more grass cycling than controls, and this effect continued to increase through the 1-year follow-up measure. On the other hand, neither commitment-only participants nor their neighbors differed from controls during any period of the experiment.