If more things end up getting recycled, reused, and repurposed instead of thrown away, that means fewer products are bought, transported, and made in factories. That, in turn, leads to less pollution, less energy and water consumed, and fewer greenhouse gasses produced.

Fewer resources get wasted while your average consumer saves money because they’re focusing on DIY, not shopping around. It’s a win for everyone who isn’t out to maximize their profits at any cost.

Recycling doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have to invest in the right infrastructure for the whole project to come together. And that’s a bigger headache than you might think at first: it’s expensive and requires a mind-boggling amount of planning. Urging your local community to recycle more is fruitless if the materials don’t actually get recycled and just end up dumped in some secret faraway landfill.

Remember, you’re not just aiming to recycle plastic chocolate chip cookie containers and soda bottles—there are a ton of different materials that you need to account for. Among them are aluminum, cardboard, electronics, food waste, glass, steel, tires, paper, textiles, yard trimmings, and wood, as well as a range of plastic, polyethylene, and polypropylene containers.

Just as an example of the logistical complexity involved, the United States Environmental Protection Agency explains that there are 15 different types of recycling and other municipal solid waste infrastructure. These include material recovery facilities, anaerobic digesters, composting facilities, electronic recyclers, glass recycling facilities, glass secondary processors, and municipal solid waste landfills.

On top of those, you have metal, paper, plastic, textile, tire, and wood recycling facilities, as well as transfer stations and wood secondary processors. Each place needs specific machinery, technology, systems, and expertise to run properly.

Let’s assume for a moment that you’ve got all the recycling facilities set up. Now, you somehow need to convince the population that they should start recycling. It’s a complicated task, though. It essentially involves changing how people perceive their relationship with the environment, spending, and consumption.

Motivating someone to recycle (more) is as much a shift in a person’s mindset and philosophy as it is a physical act of separating your recycling and dumping it in the right container.

This involves cultivating more self-awareness while shopping and educating people about the impact their actions have on the environment. If you make the problem relatable and relevant, you’ll have more people on your side than by just appealing to some lofty, faraway goals.

First of all, you have to make recycling accessible and easy. The more difficult it is to do, the more people are not going to bother. So, you’ll have to set up lots of recycling containers and bins in people’s areas.

Few people are going to walk five minutes to throw out their bag o’plastic and paper if there’s a general waste bin a few seconds away from them. Meanwhile, you want everyone to have clear instructions about what they can and can’t recycle.

Next, you’ll want to offer shoppers alternatives to excessive plastic packaging and bags. If you ban plastic bags or make them more expensive than durable paper ones, you’ll change consumers’ habits by appealing to their sense of frugality. Nobody wants to pay more for something of similar quality.

At the same time, companies need to take their eco-friendly stances seriously: though packaging can help protect products, there are egregious examples that show how wasteful and anti-environment some businesses can be.

The Facebook group has a huge following from all over the world. Currently, 1.5 million internet users are members of this community. The core idea is for folks to share useful information about reusing, recycling, and repurposing things to inspire others to do the same.

If you feel motivated to join the group, all you have to do is answer a few simple questions so that the administrator team running the whole thing knows you’re not a bot or a spammer. And in this day and age, that extra layer of verification goes a long way to keep any online community more authentic.

The R, R, and R admins urge everyone who joins the community to give more than they take. In short, the group isn’t the place for self-promotion, sales, or spam: the content and discussions have to be on-topic.

Meanwhile, all the members are expected to treat each other respectfully and with kindness. It’s only natural to have heated debates once in a while (this is social media, after all!), but this doesn’t mean that politeness can be yeeted out of the window entirely.

Which of the R, R, and R ideas in this post caught your attention the most, dear Pandas? Which ones do you plan on replicating at home? What do you personally think we could all do to motivate people to recycle, reuse, and repurpose things more? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.