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ABSTRACT
Organising waste disposal to achieve waste recovery, i.e. circular solutions, requires the active participation of citizens (Hänninen, 1995). For this purpose, schemes are put in place to “make up”, and shape, circular consumers who will return waste. These schemes tend to rely on calculative mechanisms to influence individuals’ decision-making in the desired direction. The present work studies one such government-mandated scheme, the Swedish deposit-refund system for beverage containers. The deposit-refund incentive requires customers purchasing a beverage to pay a deposit which is refunded if/when the beverage container is handed in for recycling. Using focus groups to study Swedish young adults subject to the scheme, the study aims to expand academic knowledge of the role of accounting, and particularly personal accounting, within circular schemes. The study finds that the official scheme rarely succeeds in imposing its deposit-refund accounting categories. Instead, there are plentiful examples of what Zelizer (1994) calls “counter earmarking”, i.e. personal accounting at odds with the official scheme. Exploring the young adults’ counter earmarking practices, the study shows the difficulty of imposing an accounting ideology onto individuals.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a research project funded by the Swedish research council Formas and the empirics have been collected in collaboration with Anna Kremel, Returpack, Ungdomsbarometern, Ida Wallöe Åhlander and Evelina Loftén. The author is grateful for their, as well as Niklas Wällstedt’s, comments on earlier drafts and the helpful suggestions by the two reviewers and the guest editors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 A circular economy is envisaged as an economy “having no net effects on the environment; rather it restores any damage done in resource acquisition, while ensuring little waste is generated throughout the production process and in the life history of the product” (Murray et al., Citation2017, p. 371).
2 Walker and Carnegie (Citation2007, pp. 238–239) define ideologies as systems of ideas that are utilised to legitimate the subordination of one group by another.
3 Carruthers and Espeland (Citation1991), like Thaler (Citation1999), define rational choice according to the utility-maximisation model i.e. as the measurement of subjective payoffs from a set of alternatives and selection of the alternative associated with the highest expected payoff.
4 Fungibility entails that one sum of money is a perfect substitute for another sum of money (Thaler, Citation1999, p. 185).
5 Returpack has located some reverse vending machines at recycling facilities as well, something that the literature calls the Repo recycling mode (Zhou et al., Citation2020).
6 In Sweden, unlike some other countries, grocery stores do not sell alcoholic beverages, and thus children and young adults are allowed to return containers in the store.
8 The Youth Barometer (Ungdomsbarometern) is a professional organisation specialising in working with young adults, conducting analyses, handling large data sets, interviews and focus groups.
9 Sweden is currently not one of the eight OECD countries with a non-binary gender option in the civil registry (Valfort, Citation2020), and thus these respondents were registered as either female or male.
10 But also in other kinds of communication around the deposit-refund system.
11 In a way, the system facilitates such a disconnect, for example by not requiring the person who returns the container to show a purchase receipt or to identify him/herself as the owner.