Making up circular consumers: young adults’ personal accounting and counter earmarking within a circular deposit-refund scheme

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Circular economy
• personal accounting
• earmarking
• focus groups
• deposit-refund system
• circular food packaging

1. Introduction

Circular¹ closed-loop systems depend on consumers to return used products so that they can be reused or recycled into new products. Encouraging customers to return used products in this way requires what Hänninen (1995, p. 190) calls the ability to “‘make up such a responsible individual’ (…) which could realize the promises of resource recovery”. As Miller and O’Leary (1990) discuss, calculative mechanisms are often put in place to shape responsible individuals and influence their decision-making in the desired direction. This is also the case in circular economy schemes, where financial incentives often are used to encourage consumer behaviours that close the loop between consumption and production (Knickmeyer, 2020; Wastling et al., 2018).

Previous accounting research investigating cases of making up responsible individuals has typically studied personal finances. Accounting researchers have analysed how the state, allied with media and women’s organisations, encourages patriotic thrift (Walker & Carnegie, 2007), how school tours sponsored by public authorities seek to influence young adults’ financial literacy (Bay, 2011), domestic accounting manuals that encourage rationalisation and domesticity (Walker, 1998), and even television shows promoting financial responsibility (Bay, 2018). In this way, the studies have investigated how “earmarking ideologies” (Walker & Carnegie, 2007) have been employed to influence individuals’ personal accounting decisions, what Zelizer (1994) calls earmarking, in private life.

While these studies have analysed how and why the state and various agencies put schemes in place to impose a certain earmarking ideology onto individuals, we know little about how they are received by the targeted individuals. The work by Zelizer (1994), however, indicates that such attempts to intervene may fail because the targets of these efforts have their own ideas about how to account for money, i.e. the individuals have their own personal accounting systems, an aspect which merits further study.

The present study explores the response to an official earmarking ideology in a circular scheme, the Swedish deposit-refund system for beverage cans and bottles. Thereby, the study aims to expand academic knowledge about the role of accounting, and particularly personal accounting, within circular schemes. Specifically, the study investigates how the personal accounting of young adults plays a role in their participation in a circular scheme relying on financial incentives. The government-mandated Swedish deposit-refund system for beverage cans and bottles uses a deposit-refund incentive which requires beverage customers, at the point of purchase, to pay a deposit which is repaid if/when the used beverage containers are returned for recycling. To observe how the earmarking scheme is received by targeted individuals, the study uses focus groups of young adults. Young adults, and in particular young males, are frequent consumers of beverages (Returpack, 2019) but also reluctant to participate in recycling (Ojala, 2008; Thomas & Sharp, 2013). This group of respondents thus captures both individuals who comply with the circular scheme (by returning containers in the reverse vending machines) and do not comply (e.g. throw containers in the rubbish bin).

The study offers contributions to two literatures. Firstly, it contributes to accounting studies concerned with the role of accounting in “making up” the individual (Hänninen, 1995; Miller & O’Leary, 1990, 1993; Walker & Carnegie, 2007), and personal accounting studies in particular (Bay, 2011, 2018; Carnegie & Walker, 2007; Northcott & Doolin, 2000; Walker, 1998; Walker & Carnegie, 2007; Walker & Llewellyn, 2000). It extends this literature by directing attention to the individuals who are subject to such attempts and by focusing on a scheme for making up the environmentally responsible, circular, consumer. The study finds that the young adults’ personal accounting rarely aligns with the circular scheme’s deposit-refund accounting categories. By exploring how the young adults instead conduct what Zelizer (1994) calls “counter earmarking”, i.e. personal accounting at odds with the official scheme, the study illustrates the difficulty of imposing an earmarking ideology onto individuals.

Secondly, the study contributes to studies of the consumer’s role in a circular economy (Camacho-Otero et al., 2018; Mylan et al., 2016; Singh & Giacosa, 2019; Wastling et al., 2018) by showing that although the deposit-refund scheme does not succeed in turning the young adults into circular consumers their behaviours still result in closing the loop between consumption and recycling. In particular, the study underlines the importance of informal economies and waste pickers (Ashenmiller, 2011; Barford & Ahmad, 2021; Gutberlet et al., 2017) for achieving a reverse supply chain, an aspect that has so far only received scant attention in the circular economy literature.

The next section discusses schemes for making up responsible individuals and the role of financial incentives and other calculative mechanisms in such schemes. In addition, it reviews the literature on personal accounting. The theoretical framework used in the analysis is then presented. An overview of the empirical data, methods and data analysis follows. The empirical findings are then presented and discussed in relation to previous literature. The article ends by presenting conclusions.

2. Literature review

2.1. Making up circular consumers

As Hänninen (1995) notes, organising waste disposal in order to achieve waste recovery, i.e. circular systems such as the recycling scheme studied here, requires the active participation of citizens. Indeed, the return of used products for reuse, recycling and remanufacturing is an important research area within the circular economy literature, usually labelled reverse logistics or closed-loop supply chains (Govindan et al., 2015; Östlin et al., 2008). Encouraging customers to return used products is known to be challenging. It requires what Hänninen (1995) calls the ability to make up a responsible individual who can realise the promises of resource recovery.

Despite the key role of consumers in achieving a reverse supply chain, the circular economy literature has paid only limited attention to consumer behaviour (Camacho-Otero et al., 2018; Maitre-Ekern & Dalhammar, 2019; Sijtsema et al., 2020; Singh & Giacosa, 2019; Wastling et al., 2018), focusing on consumer attitudes (Maitre-Ekern & Dalhammar, 2019; Sijtsema et al., 2020) and consumers’ need for incentives to participate in the circular economy (Camacho-Otero et al., 2018; Mugge et al., 2017). These aspects, in addition to rigid consumer behaviour and cognitive biases (Singh & Giacosa, 2019), are typically seen as hindering the circular economy where a new consumer culture is required (Corvellec et al., 2021). As Mylan et al. (2016) argues, the circular economy literature typically views domestic consumption as a phenomenon to be corrected through top-down interventions to enable consumers to make more sustainable consumption choices.

The present study explores the workings of such a top-down intervention, a government-mandated scheme that aims to create circular consumer behaviour. As Miller and O’Leary (1990) note, schemes that seek to shape responsible individuals tend to use calculative mechanisms to influence individuals’ decision-making in the desired direction. Indeed, accounting representations and metrics can be seen as interventions that serve to shape people and processes (Miller & Power, 2013). Such interventions are also common in circular economy schemes. Reviewing the different customer relationships commonly used to encourage the return of used products, Östlin et al. (2008) show that financial incentives are a core strategy to incentivise the customer and close the loop between customers, recycling and remanufacturing. Reviewing factors that encourage household recycling, Knickmeyer (2020) includes economic incentives among the motivators that should be included in the schemes. In order to inform our understanding of such top-down interventions, we can learn from the accounting literature and its accumulated knowledge about governing with accounting representations and calculative mechanisms.

2.2. Accounting studies of making up individuals

Research within accounting studies has previously investigated how different agencies seek to make up and shape responsible individuals in various settings. Walker (1998) describes it as imposing an “earmarking ideology”,² for example thrift (Walker & Carnegie, 2007) or domesticity (Walker, 1998), onto individuals. Miller and O’Leary (1990) instead use the term rationale to describe how accounting practices contain ingrained cultural values such as rational decision-making, responsibility and authority, which also motivate their existence and use. These rationales, Miller and O’Leary (1990) argue, are not a priori foundations of accounting practice, but rather historically contingent concepts.

Much accounting research has been conducted in the business setting and, despite acknowledging that rationales are established in a cultural context (Miller & O’Leary, 1990), it tends to find that accounting supports individuals’ economising abilities (Miller & Power, 2013; Miller & Rose, 1990). Miller (2008) views accounting practices as entangled with disciplines such as economics, engineering and actuarial science that promote ideas such as competitiveness, effectiveness and financial norms. According to Carruthers and Espeland (1991), this is at least how accounting is marketed, couched in a vocabulary of rationality.³

In response to such depictions of accounting rationales, it is easy to worry about its introduction into the personal sphere. Zelizer (2004, p. 124), however, argues that the view of accounting as promoting impersonal rationality is a common misunderstanding:

Explicitly or implicitly, most analysts of intimate social relations join ordinary people in assuming that the entry of instrumental means such as monetization or cost accounting into the worlds of caring, friendship, sexuality, parent–child relations, and personal information depletes them of their richness, hence that zones of intimacy only thrive if people erect effective barriers around them.

Studies of personal accounting, which examine accounting in private life, provide further nuance to this picture. As Walker (1998) and Walker and Carnegie (2007) show, earmarking ideologies may contain a strong social or relational component, such as ideas about relations between the genders, or between husband and wife (cf. Carnegie & Walker, 2007). The earmarking ideology may reflect ideas about relations between social groups, e.g. the bourgeois household and its domestic staff (Walker, 1998) or social workers and the poor (Zelizer, 1994). Studying the middle class home during the nineteenth century, Walker (1998) finds that household accounting was embedded within the rationale of social advancement and was promoted as a means to avoid familial conflict arising from debt and extravagant expenditure.

While these earmarking ideologies and rationales are intended to influence individuals, little is known about the effects of such attempts. Studies concerned with making up individuals in everyday life have generally collected a type of empirics that is unable to illustrate how the ideologies are received by the targeted individuals. Carnegie and Walker (2007), for example, analyse the cultural and state earmarking ideologies that encourage families to reallocate funds within the budget for the sake of patriotic thrift during wartime. While they study historical domestic accounts and find that savings deposited in life insurance plans increased, which potentially indicates some compliance with the thrift ideology; we cannot know if this is simply a correlation and whether households were primarily influenced by the contemporary advice literature on household financial management.

The handful of empirical studies of contemporary household accounting practices (e.g. Halawa & Olcoń-Kubicka, 2018; Northcott & Doolin, 2000), on the other hand, do not trace the origins of the earmarking ideologies reflected in the accounting practices. Northcott and Doolin (2000) – studying budgeting, record-keeping, decision-making and long-term financial planning in the domestic setting – find that accounting is used by individuals to self-constrain their actions; i.e. they find that individuals do not trust themselves to act in a financially sensible way and therefore use accounting to constrain their future actions. While these studies show that the individuals’ intentions often are in line with business accounting rationales such as visibility, comparison and self-discipline, they also show that personal accounting practices may reflect and advance other ideologies. For example, while most of the households studied by Halawa and Olcoń-Kubicka (2018) focused on cost reduction, one couple instead used accounting to ensure fairness between the spouses, i.e. equal financial contributions by both.

Consequently, there is little knowledge about how earmarking ideologies and rationales are received in practice, and also limited knowledge about the origins of the rationales and earmarking ideologies reflected in individuals’ personal accounting. Thus, the actual effects of an official earmarking ideology on the targeted individuals remain unclear. Zelizer (1994), however, notes how attempts to impose particular ways of earmarking tend to fail because the targets of these efforts have their own ideas about earmarking; i.e. they have their own personal ways of doing accounting. As a result, alongside attempts to intervene, one invariably finds contestation and counter earmarking. Since little is known about this latter aspect, the present study builds on, and seeks to add to, Zelizer’s (1994) work on counter earmarking.

2.3. Personal accounting: an interdisciplinary research area

To understand how accounting rationales and earmarking ideologies are received by individuals, it is necessary to understand the context in which they are received, namely people’s everyday personal accounting practices. Accounting as it is practised by individuals and households – labelled either personal, mental, domestic or household accounting – has been studied within accounting studies (Bay, 2018; Carnegie & Walker, 2007; Northcott & Doolin, 2000; Walker, 1998; Walker & Carnegie, 2007; Walker & Llewellyn, 2000), economic anthropology (e.g. Dalton, 1965; Douglas, 1967; Lave, 1984, 1988), economic sociology (e.g. Baker, 1987; Halawa & Olcoń-Kubicka, 2018; Hayes & O’Brien, 2021; Wherry, 2016; Zelizer, 1989, 1994, 1996, 1998) and economic psychology (e.g. Cheema & Soman, 2006; Thaler, 1999, 2008).

Within economic anthropology and sociology, Lave (1984) and Zelizer (1989, 1994, 1996, 1998) for example observe how individuals divide their income into incommensurate stashes for specific purposes, thereby counteracting the universal aspect of money and its ability to make values commensurate. Arriving at similar conclusions as these authors, economic psychologist Thaler (1999) argues how, despite education and the use of financial information, most adults violate the economic principle of fungibility⁴ because of their mental accounting; i.e. mental accounting induces individuals to treat money in one mental account as entirely different from money in another account.

This understanding of everyday personal accounting, making sums of money incommensurate, stands in stark contrast to how accounting has been shown to make values commensurate (e.g. Carruthers & Espeland, 1991). Clearly, while accounting may serve to make otherwise noncomparable objects commensurate and thereby facilitate financial rationality, it can equally locate funds into incommensurable stashes, which makes it more difficult to rationally compare alternatives belonging to different accounts. Earmarking money into different accounts and stashes in this way serves as an exchange control, with the effect that money put into one account can no longer be used for another purpose. Of course, one could argue that personal accounting as earmarking is a unique exception to how accounting more generally is associated with competitiveness, effectiveness and financial rationality. On the contrary, Zelizer (2004, p. 124) argues that “careful observers of such institutions [money, markets and bureaucracies] always report the presence, and often wild profusion, of intimate ties in their midst”.

3. Zelizer’s theory of earmarking

This study draws on Zelizer’s (1994) earmarking framework to analyse how young adults’ personal accounting plays a role in how they respond to the circular scheme and participate in it. Whereas within economic psychology mental accounting is concerned with how individuals distinguish between sums of money, a sociological analysis also includes how cultural and social structures introduce restrictions and distinctions that serve to earmark money. Indeed, economic psychology’s version of mental accounting has been criticised for not paying attention to the formation and development of mental accounts (Henderson & Peterson, 1992). In contrast, Zelizer (1994) does not locate interpretative schemes, what she calls earmarking, solely in people’s heads, but instead compares earmarking to a language. In this way, cultural and social structures set inevitable limits on the monetisation process by introducing profound restrictions on the flow and liquidity of money.

Zelizer (1989, 1994) introduces the concept of earmarking to theorise the differentiation or qualitative categorisation of money whereby money attains special qualities and distinct values independent of quantity. A sum received from selling a cow is qualitatively different from the sum received from a dowry, and both are different from a sum earned (Zelizer, 1994). In this way, the monies manifest, and may reinforce, social relations and meanings. Earmarking also directly affects practices. People not only think and feel differently about their monies, but spend or save them for different purposes, and give them to different people.

Zelizer’s (1994) framework is useful for this study because she describes how earmarking can be organised. Money can be earmarked by its intended user. For example, within the family, some money is dedicated to the children, whereas in occupational settings tips are for waiters and not lawyers. Zelizer (1994) further describes how money can be earmarked by its use. As another example, “pin money”, an independent income for a wife’s personal use stipulated in a marriage contract, was ideally used for expenses such as charity or a daughter’s lessons in music and the arts. Other funds could instead be earmarked for main household expenses.

Money is further earmarked by its source and thus how the money is received matters. A gift originates from a voluntary bestowal, whereas a payment is a direct exchange. Entitlement, on the other hand, originates from a right to a share. The origin of a sum of money thus exhibits different kinds of relationships between the provider and receiver, with compensation, Zelizer (1996) writes, implying an equal exchange of values at a certain distance. Money as entitlement implies strong claims to power and autonomy by the recipient. Money as a gift instead implies subordination and arbitrariness.

Money is further earmarked by its system of allocation, i.e. the system of calculation and distribution. Zelizer (1994) describes how income, gifts or cash relief are calculated and distributed differently based on contrasting principles, guidelines and philosophies. The system of allocation thus marks the equality or inequality of the parties, just as it marks the intimacy and durability of the relationship. As relations change, systems of allocation may change accordingly. Zelizer (1998) notes how the allocation of a housewife’s income changed in the early twentieth century from a handout to a regular allowance, with joint accounts eventually emerging as the new ideal. The system of allocation may further involve transforming selected material objects into money and creating new restricted money, as in the present case of deposit cans and bottles that are refunded in restricted locations.

In addition, earmarking is often contested. Zelizer (1994) shows how several different types of earmarking may coexist and compete. She provides an example of conflicting types of earmarking by social workers and recipients of relief. These groups earmark the social benefits differently: as a gift to the poor or as an entitlement merely expedited by the social worker. The earmarking matters since it determines whether the social worker is allowed to tell the recipient how to spend the money. Sometimes, as with the deposit-refund system studied here, entire programs serve to spread a particular system of earmarking certain monies. However, as in the case of the social workers, the participants’ earmarking of the deposit-refund may diverge from the system’s original plan, something that Zelizer calls counter earmarking and which is further explored in the present case.

4. Empirical case, research methods and analysis approach

4.1. The Swedish deposit-refund system for beverage containers

Deposit-refund systems were originally put in place by the beverage industry itself in the 19th–20th centuries to ensure the return of refillable beverage containers, typically glass bottles (Friedel, 2014). It was only in response to the widespread adoption of single-use beverage containers, mostly metal cans, in the 1950–1960s that government-mandated deposit-refund systems began to appear in the 1970–1980s (Moore & Scott, 1983; Zhou et al., 2020). As in several other countries, the idea of a mandatory deposit-refund system emerged in Sweden due to littering caused by the single-use containers. Although initially resisted by industry, a government regulation and deposit-refund system for metal cans (1982) and later plastic bottles (1991) was eventually put in place in Sweden (Tojo, 2011).

Returpack (AB Svenska Returpack) – owned by the Swedish Brewers Association, the Food and Marketing Federation and the Swedish Food Retailers Federation – is responsible for the Swedish system for collecting and recycling aluminium cans and PET bottles. The government, through the Swedish Board of Agriculture, supervises Returpack (Zhou et al., 2020). All beverage containers such as PET plastic bottles or metal cans intended for the Swedish consumer market must be part of the deposit-refund system. Dairy products and juice are excluded from the regulation, but juice producers are voluntarily entering the deposit-refund system due to the competitive advantage of environmentally friendly packaging.

A deposit-refund system requires customers purchasing an item to pay an additional deposit which is refunded when the used item is handed in. The system thereby transforms selected material objects, in this case beverage containers marked with the deposit symbol, into a restricted form of money. These deposit containers can be exchanged for regular currency when returned in reverse vending machines. The Swedish deposit-refund system operates in what the literature calls a Retail Recycling Mode⁵ (Zhou et al., 2020), and the reverse vending machines are mainly located at retailers, i.e. grocery stores.⁶

The Swedish deposit-refund system recovers 85 per cent of all produced deposit containers (Naturvårdsverket, 2019). Deposit-refund systems are particularly effective when there is awareness of the system, high density of return sites and appropriate deposit size (Knickmeyer, 2020). Although deposit-refund systems tend to be successful in directing behaviour in this way, some percentage of all bottles and cans are never recovered (Zhou et al., 2020). For this reason, it is interesting to study young adults, since they are the most frequent consumers of single-use beverage containers (Returpack, 2019) but less inclined to participate in recycling (Ojala, 2008; Thomas & Sharp, 2013).

Research has suggested that mental accounting is affected by an individual’s financial literacy (Muehlbacher & Kirchler, 2019). 92 per cent of Swedish adults (aged 18–79) are considered financially literate⁷ and the Swedish school curriculum includes education in the conditions of consumption, saving, credit and loans (Stenlund & Näslund, 2020). Another characteristic of the Swedish setting is the rapid, compared to other countries, disappearance of cash over the past ten years (Sveriges Riksbank, 2019), partly due to digital financial services, e.g. via smartphones (“Swish”). The Swedish deposit-refund system, however, does not yet allow a digital refund of the deposit money.

4.2. Focus groups as a research method

The empirical data consists of seven focus groups conducted with participants aged 15–28 from different cities in Sweden in February and April 2020. Focus groups capture how a group of individuals interact and discuss a specific topic, and are thus a way to gather data from multiple respondents at the same time (Morgan, 1996).

Four focus groups were held in February 2020, before the COVID-19 crisis, and conducted face-to-face in groups of 8–10 respondents. Two of these were held in Örebro, a medium-sized city, and two in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The respondents in these four focus groups were 15–20 years of age. Three focus groups with respondents aged 21–28 were conducted during the COVID-19 crisis, in April 2020, using Zoom communications software in smaller groups (4–5 participants) to facilitate interaction in a digital format. The fact that these focus groups were held online provided an opportunity to invite geographically dispersed participants (de Villiers et al., 2021). These three focus groups included participants from the student cities Umeå, Uppsala, Gothenburg and Lund.

Different methods were used to recruit the participants. For the younger participants in Örebro and Stockholm, a panel list provided by The Youth Barometer⁸ served as the starting point. To recruit further participants, Youth Barometer staff approached young adults outside a high school and asked them to participate. These respondents were given a modest compensation for participating, 500 Swedish kronor (about 50 Euros). The older respondents were recruited by two master’s students using snowball selection and were not compensated.

In each case, the recruitment was followed by a short interview where participants were put through a screening test to build each focus group according to specifications such as age, gender and understanding of the Swedish language. The aim was to recruit beverage consumers in the age range 15–28 years, an equal number of female and male participants, and persons responsible for their own household as well as living with parents. Friends did not participate in the same focus group. Altogether, there were 47 participants (22 female and 25 male) (Table 1).⁹

Table 1. Overview of the sample.

Total number of participants	47
Number of male participants	25
Number of female participants	22
Number of focus groups	7

The focus-group sessions held on location lasted for about two hours, with a short break and refreshments halfway through. The focus groups on Zoom lasted only around one hour to keep the participants’ attention. All the sessions followed a semi-structured protocol of individual questions concerning different aspects of the deposit-refund system and the respondents’ consumption patterns and experiences of the system, but they also included group discussions. Audio and video recordings of the discussions were used to transcribe the sessions.

Challenges with focus-group data collection include making respondents feel at ease, deciding which questions to raise, and fulfilling the role of moderator (Morgan, 1996). In the present case, the two moderators were 25–30 years old and accustomed to interacting with young adults. As de Villiers et al. (2021) argue, the moderator needs to manage the flow of conversation in a digital setting in a similar way as in a face-to-face interview. To do so, in both the digital and face-to-face focus groups, the moderator started by asking an introductory question to the group, and then asked all participants for their opinions, one by one. The moderator ensured that all participants had a chance to talk and answer questions, and that the participants could ask each other questions and voice their personal opinions.

Norms may emerge in discussions and encourage respondents to respond in a socially desirable, rather than truthful, way. Hence, self-reported accounts of recycling do not equate to actual behaviour (Huffman et al., 2014). The present focus groups included both those who professed to recycle and those who admitted that they do not recycle. Consequently, no dominant recycling norm emerged in the focus groups. While the focus-group questions focused on actual situations, thereby seeking to connect responses to real situations, this study nonetheless relies on self-reported recycling, which correlates with, but does not equate to, observed recycling behaviour (Huffman et al., 2014).

4.3. Analysis approach

The focus-group transcriptions were coded using the qualitative software package NVivo 12. During the coding, the researcher reviewed the literature on household use of money and calculation, in order to find ways to explain the participants’ engagement with the deposit-refund system and particularly its financial incentive. Hence, at this stage, Zelizer’s (1994) earmarking framework was not the principal focus, and the data was coded more broadly, as shown in Figure 1 in the online appendix, to explore what kinds of analysis different theoretical frameworks might provide. While reviewing the initial broad coding, most of the codes appeared to fit quite neatly within Zelizer’s (1994) framework, which then became the selected analytical framework. The coding was subsequently refined and linked to Zelizer’s (1994) categories; see Figure 1 and Table 2 (both in the online appendix).

Two of the initial codes, entitlement and disconnect (see Figure 1), concerned whether the young adults conduct earmarking in line with the official scheme or conduct counter earmarking. Entitlement is a form of earmarking by source, according to Zelizer (1994), where recipients earmark the money they receive as something already belonging to them. This is how a refund of a paid deposit should be earmarked, as it is previously deposited money that is being returned. Whereas a few respondents recognised this fact and earmarked the refund as such, many respondents did not perceive the deposit and refund as two connected transactions. In the initial coding, the code “disconnect” was used to mark examples where the respondents did not recognise the relation between deposit and refund. These two codes, entitlement and disconnect, and the examples covered by them, have consequently formed the basis for understanding the young adults’ earmarking and whether it is in line with the deposit-refund scheme.

As can be seen in Figure 1, the coding included, but was not limited to, the different forms of earmarking that Zelizer (1994) describes. For example, section 5.1. discusses how the respondents earmark the deposit as part of the beverage’s price. This is a form of counter earmarking, since it is at odds with what the deposit-refund scheme prescribes. Since Zelizer’s (1994) framework has no suitable category to characterise the young adults’ earmarking of the paid deposit, this type of earmarking (see code “price”) is derived directly from the empirics.

In contrast, the earmarking of the refund translates more directly into Zelizer’s (1994) types of earmarking. For example, the codes “intended user” and “system of allocation” fit directly into Zelizer’s framework, while certain other codes (e.g. earnings, bonus and discount) instead fit as sub-categories of one of Zelizer’s types. These sub-categories reflect differences in how the respondents earmark the refund. Further sub-categories emerged only during the stage of writing. For example, it became evident that there are differences in how the official system of allocation influences the young adults’ earmarking compared to the informal add-on systems. Consequently, these two types of allocation systems are accounted for separately in section 5.4.

5. Findings

The studied scheme uses a monetary deposit-refund incentive to impose circular consumer behaviour onto citizens. The scheme’s official earmarking ideology states that when customers buy beverages belonging to the deposit-refund system, they pay a deposit in addition to the price, and the deposit is refunded if/when the used container is returned within the system. Consequently, the refund is the customer’s previously deposited money, i.e. an entitlement, which is reimbursed when consumers adopt the circular behaviour of returning used containers for recycling. In a sense, the system borrows the deposit money while the container is in the customer’s possession.

Instead of adopting this official earmarking ideology, the young adults practise their own counter earmarking. Indeed, the young adults who earmark the paid sum and its refund as a deposit, and thus an entitlement (see example in Table 2 in the online appendix), are in the minority. Instead, most of the young adults treat the deposit and refund as two independent transactions; i.e. they perceive a disconnect (see Table 2) between paid deposit and refund. The following sections investigate in detail how the young adults counter earmark the two monetary transactions. An overview and summary of the theorised findings is provided in Table 3 in the online appendix.

5.1. Earmarking the paid deposit as part of the price

While the official scheme accounts for the paid deposit separately, both on the price tag in the store and on the receipt,¹⁰ the young adults do not distinguish the paid deposit sum from the beverage’s price, but earmark it as part of the price. In fact, some respondents were unaware of the fact that they pay a deposit when buying beverages. The term “deposit” has instead become entirely associated with the refund transaction in their minds, i.e. getting money for returning used containers for recycling. The Swedish word for deposit (pant) has, in fact, turned into a verb (panta) signifying the act of recycling used containers within the system. The focus groups thus included discussions of what the respondents really mean when they say deposit. Whereas some young adults use the term “panta” for recycling used containers in the dedicated reverse vending machines and getting money for it, others use it more loosely, and consider it enough to just make sure that someone returns the used deposit container:

Returning the deposit containers [panta] can also be like at [name of high school] where there are many rubbish bins specifically for deposit containers, and if you choose to throw it into one of these instead of the usual [rubbish bin], that’s also to do a return [panta] in my opinion. (Örebro focus group 1)

Thus the young adults’ idea of a deposit rarely includes the sum paid at the point of purchase. Certain aspects of the deposit-refund system’s set-up influence this earmarking practice. The fact that the deposit is paid together with the regular beverage price most likely supports earmarking of the deposit as part of the price, especially if one does not pay attention to price tags or receipts. In addition, the respondents argued that it does not feel like they pay a deposit because the deposit sum is so small. A small sum makes the paid deposit seem insignificant.

The practice of earmarking the deposit as part of the beverage’s price shapes the young adults’ behaviour, which in turn has consequences for the circular system. For example, the young adults generally agreed that a higher deposit sum would affect their consumption habits in some way. A higher deposit sum would be perceived as a higher price. One potential effect could be that they buy less beverages:

Respondent 3: Then maybe there would be fewer spontaneous purchases “I’m thirsty, so I’ll buy a bottle”. Doing it less often.

Respondent 2: Yes, you might get better at bringing your own water bottle then.

(…)

Respondent 4: Yes, more people would reclaim the deposit then [in case of a high deposit sum], it becomes a form of saving. [All agree]

Respondent 3: You wouldn’t buy a regular bottle and throw it away while in town so often [All agree]. (University students focus group 1)

As seen in the quotation, a higher deposit sum would most likely encourage more diligent recycling of deposit containers, but it would also make the respondents reconsider whether they would buy the beverage at all. They might start bringing their own bottle, use a soda stream, or even import beverages from abroad. It could also encourage them to consume beverages that are not part of the deposit-refund system, for example beverages in paper cans or glass bottles.

Interestingly, the respondents who recognised a link between the paid deposit and its refund did not necessarily react in the same way to a hypothetically higher deposit sum, unless the deposit sum would be much higher than the beverage’s price:

… yes, well, then it’s like “whatever”, since it’s the same money in and out, really. Unless it [the deposit sum] would be 100 kronor, that would be a pain [other student agrees]. (University students focus group 3)

5.2. Earmarking by source: earnings, a bonus or a discount

While the paid deposit is almost uniformly earmarked as part of the beverage’s price, the refund is earmarked in several different ways. The following section explores how the perceived source of the returned funds leads to three different types of earmarking.

5.2.1. Earmarking the refund as earnings

The young adults who earmarked the deposit as money earned viewed the refund as compensation for the effort of returning the container for recycling within the system. The effort could involve cycling to the grocery store or carrying empty containers on the bus. The feeling of earning money was also influenced by the way in which most of the respondents had learnt to recycle deposit containers:

At home we have these stacks of bin bags, so you can take three big black bin bags and cycle to do the return. Then you get 400 kronor. And we have this system in the family that the one who does the return gets the money. (Örebro focus group 2)

The family collection of deposit containers thus becomes an earning system where extra money can be earned by any family member who returns the family’s accumulated deposit containers for recycling. As children, the respondents had this way financed their Saturday candy treat. Among the college students, some respondents still earn the family’s accumulated deposit money in this way.

This type of family earning systems redistributes money within the family. If the young adults reclaim the family’s accumulated deposits, the system redistributes money from parents to the young adults. In other families, the young adults are frequent beverage consumers but do not engage in recycling themselves and money is instead redistributed from the young adults to the parents. Hence, the deposited money rarely return to the family member who originally paid the deposit, but goes to the family member who makes the effort to return the containers. This redistribution of money from beverage consumer to recycler reinforces a disconnect between the deposit and the refund.

Earmarking the reclaimed deposits as earned money can this way be an incentive to return other people’s containers, for example within the family setting, at a young age, or in cultural environments where showing environmental concern reflects well on you. However, earmarking the deposit as earnings may equally deter respondents from collecting and returning their own as well as other people’s deposit containers. Indeed, one respondent argued that reclaiming the deposit money may reflect negatively on oneself or one’s family, since it may look as if one needs the money, and people in the community could start to talk. Thus, respondents in certain cultural environments could worry that reclaiming deposits would reflect negatively on them; i.e. it could signal that they are poor. For other respondents, with yet other cultural backgrounds, collecting your own empty containers is OK, but not collecting those of others:

It’s sort of one thing if you go and look for deposit cans or pick them up off the ground, it doesn’t look so good. Whereas, if you have a deposit can and you finish it and put it in your bag, it’s not the same thing, I think. (Örebro focus group 2)

Interestingly, these respondents, who nowadays only collect their own containers, reported that, as children, they also collected other people’s deposit containers, for example by pretending they were collecting deposits for a school trip, but actually keeping the money for themselves.

5.2.2. Earmarking the refund as a bonus

In most of the focus groups, at least one or two respondents instead earmark the deposit money as a bonus they receive for doing the right thing. Both university and high school students belong to this group. These respondents typically view the refunded deposit money as a bonus they receive because they are doing something beneficial for the environment. This attitude reflects a moral stance that recycling should be carried out with or without some sort of reward.

The fact that returning deposit containers is good for the environment thus provides an extra layer of meaning for these respondents and, as a consequence, the deposit money becomes secondary, although not entirely unimportant. Indeed, there were different perspectives among the respondents, with some perceiving the environmental benefit as a bonus, and others viewing the deposit money as the bonus:

Respondent: You get the money, so that’s nice, but, on top of that, it’s also good for the environment, so it’s like a bonus. You get money to make a difference for … 

Moderator: What’s the added bonus? That it’s good for the environment or that you get the money?

Respondent: Good question, well, I would say I’d take the money, and on top of that it’s good for the environment. (Focus group Örebro 2)

While there is a fine line between earmarking the returned deposit as earnings or a bonus, the main difference is that the respondents who earmarked the money as a bonus did not see it as proper compensation for the effort. Whereas respondents who earmarked the funds as earnings would emphasise the effort involved in returning containers, the respondents who earmarked the money as a bonus rather saw recycling as something they normally do and the deposit money as a small encouragement to keep up an environmentally friendly habit. Thus, for these respondents, the refund was not a form of compensation, but rather a reward. Indeed, several respondents referred to the deposit-refund system as a reward system.

Because these respondents perceived the money as secondary, they were less likely to save the money or use it for themselves. Instead, some of these respondents donated the money to charity, for example by using the charity button available on some reverse vending machines. Moreover, since these respondents earmarked the money as a bonus rather than something earned, they did not seem to worry about how the deposit money reflects on them.

5.2.3. Earmarking the refund as a discount

Yet other respondents earmark the refund as a discount, awarded by the grocery store. It is easy to see how the set-up of the deposit-refund system might encourage consumers to earmark the refund as a store discount. When the deposit containers are returned in a reverse vending machine in the grocery store, they are converted into a receipt for the same amount, which can be used as currency in the particular store for a period of time, or exchanged for cash by the cashier. The refund is thus tightly associated with the location.

This type of earmarking by source has consequences for the respondents’ behaviour and whether they will bother to return deposit containers. Because the refund is earmarked as a discount awarded by the store, some younger respondent argued that it might be relevant for their parents’ to return containers, since they go grocery shopping anyway, but not to themselves. In contrast, the older respondents typically do their own grocery shopping and expressed how returning containers at the grocery store in exchange for a discount would be worth it to them, especially at times when they had little money, such as right before their student allowance arrives. Thus the earmarking of the refund as something awarded by the grocery store could both encourage and discourage the young adults to return containers.

In addition, some of the younger respondents still in school reported how they were able to return deposit containers at the school cafeteria, a return location not organised by Returpack. In these cases, the school cafeteria awards a discount in exchange for deposit containers, which allows high school students to trade in deposit containers for cafeteria food items. This kind of informal system of allocation, further discussed in 5.4.2., appears to encourage similar earmarking by source as the grocery store. It encourages returns by those who visit this type of location. Some respondents had even learned the exchange value of the container in such arenas, for example that five cans are a sandwich.

5.3. Earmarking by use: the spending account

As indicated in the previous two sections, many respondents allocate the returned deposit money to a mental spending account, which they may spend on charity, items at the grocery store or cafeteria, or for other purposes. Thus, once the paid deposit has left their own or family member’s wallet when paying for the beverage, it does not return to their bank account. Instead, the returned money is seen as new or extra money and is placed in a spending account.

For young adults responsible for their own grocery shopping, the returned money was a welcome reduction of the sum they would pay anyway. Many of these respondents thus used the deposit money to buy groceries. Being able to exchange deposit containers for physical products in the grocery store gives the small deposit sum greater significance; it becomes worth something and they receive a tangible product in exchange. It was equally common to spend the deposit money on indulgences in this way:

Moderator: You said you get money when you return it. What do you do with it?

Respondent 1: It becomes candy, soda and such things. You go into the store when you have returned it.

Respondent 2: That’s what’s dangerous, that you mostly have to enter the store. (Örebro focus group 2)

For the young adults not responsible for their own grocery shopping, and others with a less thrifty approach to their spending, the deposit money is likely to support beverage, cigarette, and candy habits.

Deposit containers could often accumulate in the household, for example over time or after hosting a party. When a large quantity of containers is returned, it is no longer seen as an insignificant sum of money that you would donate or buy candy for. However, even a large refund is qualitatively distinguished and placed in some form of mental spending account. Rather than spent immediately in the store, a large refund is likely to be earmarked for future spending, for example to finance a horse or to buy clothes.

Overall, the deposit money thus rarely returns to the account from which it once came. Instead, the deposits redistribute money not only from beverage consumer to recycler, but also within the person’s own finances, and the repaid deposit becomes money to spend, whether directly in the store, for charity, or for a future, greater purpose.

5.4. Earmarking by the system of allocation

Although the young adults’ earmarking does not align with the official scheme in terms of earmarking the incentive as a deposit-refund, the set-up of the official system still interacts with the young adults’ earmarking practices and affects how they earmark the deposit and refund. Moreover, in addition to the deposit-refund system’s official set-up, informally organised systems also influence the young adults’ earmarking.

5.4.1. Earmarking by the official system of allocation

Several aspects of the official system of allocation influence the young adults’ earmarking practices, for example the location of the reverse vending machines and the format of the refund. The fact that the reverse vending machines are mostly located in grocery stores encourages respondents to earmark the refund as a store discount and makes it likely that they will spend the deposit money immediately in the store. Still, a few respondents appeared to be unaffected by the return location, and these young adults would save deposit money for non-grocery purposes.

A few further aspects of the formal set up were brought up by the young adults. One is the possibility to donate deposits to charity. The reverse vending machines usually have a special button, “donate to charity”, which encourages donation of the refund to a charity selected by the local grocery store. This way, the system redistributes money from beverage consumers to specific charities. However, only a few respondents used this button, and thus it was not a strong influence on the young adults’ earmarking practices.

Another aspect of the system of allocation, brought up by some of the younger respondents, is the format in which the refund is allocated. The deposit money is returned either as coins or as a discount receipt at the store. Some young adults felt that it was more difficult to restrict the use of money when handling physical money, for example coins overflowing their wallets. Physical coins were more easily lost. It was spent too fast. Others argued that the physical quality of cash money made them more aware of the value it represents. Thus, to them, cash had more value than the same amount of money in their bank account. Thus the physical aspect of cash affected the earmarking practices.

Dodd (2005) argues that one of the main consequences of society’s turn towards digital money is that money increasingly takes the form of personal credit at the bank. In a sense, this is a digitalisation of the old system of personal credit lines to suppliers. Physical money, on the other hand, has its own independent life as physical items that can, as some respondents had experienced, be lost. However, for others, the physical aspect of money made it seem more real than digital money. Although the respondents had different views on how cash is treated, they agreed that the format of the refund affects how they treat the money.

5.4.2. Earmarking by informal systems of allocation

While the formal deposit-refund system encourages certain kinds of earmarking because of how the system is set up and allocates money, informal systems of allocation, not organised by the system owner Returpack, equally shape the earmarking of the deposit. In many of these cases, the informal systems appear to reinforce the same kinds of earmarking: deposit money being earmarked for spending, food and charity. In the earlier described case of the school cafeteria, for example, the informal system reinforces the financial value of deposit containers, connects it with food consumption and encourages the recycling of containers at school.

The informal charity systems were more frequently used than the reverse vending machines’ charity button. One such system is to give the deposit containers to “people in need”, for example beggars. The respondents noted that beggars systematically position themselves in front of grocery stores or at recycling locations to receive donations in the form of deposit containers. This is also an example of how the formal system cannot entirely direct the young adults’ behaviour. Rather than returning containers themselves, they made use of informal practices and systems, such as donating containers to beggars, or leaving containers where waste pickers would collect them. As long as the deposit container was left in a visible place, for example on top of a public rubbish bin, someone would find it and reclaim the deposit. Several respondents used this informal system extensively, confident that the used containers would not end up as litter in the environment. Others resented this informal charity system, and felt that beggars were too keen to claim their deposits. They felt that they needed the deposit money themselves and would avoid doing returns at times when beggars were sitting outside the grocery store.

Yet another kind of informal charity system is when the young adults’ sports club or school class saves deposit containers to finance some special goal, or donates the accumulated deposits to charity. Such informally organised donations of deposit money can be of a more or less unselfish nature. The accumulated deposits might be donated to a charity, e.g. to people in need in developing countries, but they could also be used to benefit the students who had collected and returned the containers, for example by funding a school trip, special ceremony or graduation party. Compared to the situation with beggars, such community charity systems reinforce the value of collecting the deposit containers oneself, since the young adults would benefit from the collected deposit money. Similarly, the previously discussed add-on earnings system, where family members earn money by recycling the family’s accumulated deposits, also reinforces the value of returning containers and reclaiming deposits, though not necessarily your own.

5.5. Earmarking by user

As alluded to in previous sections, deposit money is also earmarked for certain types of users, particularly children. Because of the family habit of letting children collect the refund, many respondents earmark the deposit money as children’s pocket money. Although only some of the young adults continue to return containers themselves, they continue to associate deposit money with children:

I’m thinking about how a lot of children reclaim deposits to get money that way. For example at my job. I work at a camp, and there was a kid who had done returns for 2,000 kronor so that kids who couldn’t afford to go to camp could attend camp. I always associate returns with this. (University students focus group 1)

This quotation summarises the type of users that the respondents associate with deposit money: children and people in need. This earmarking was partly influenced by the fact that the sum received for each returned container is small. The small sum was used as a motivation for why one would give the deposit to someone “who needed it more”, i.e. to someone who, unlike oneself, value small sums.

Because of such earmarking, some young adults worry that reclaiming the deposit will reflect negatively on them. Reclaiming the deposit could signal that they are greedy or that they in fact are in need of small amounts of money, which could be embarrassing. Some focus groups discussed whether this was because the young adults associate deposit money with beggars and waste pickers. The fact that beggars “needed the money more” was a dilemma:

Yes, and I also feel that way, that if you’re about to reclaim the deposit, and then you approach a store and someone’s sitting there and begging, then I feel like it’s difficult, because it feels like I’m doing something selfish, and then it feels like you have to do the return and give it to those outside, even though you collected it yourself, and they’re my deposits, and I paid for it originally. But you still feel that way, that you have to give it to the person sitting there. (Örebro focus group 2)

The respondent recognised that the deposit-refund scheme in this way redistributes his/her money to the beggars, something that the respondent had conflicting feelings about. Indeed, keeping the refund for themselves when other people needed the money more would make some of them feel selfish or, as another respondent expressed it, like a greedy person. Even so, a very small number of respondents did feel that they belonged to this category of people in need. Particularly young adults not living with their parents admitted that sometimes they were “broke” and had to think about even small sums of deposit money. Or, as a young respondent living independently unashamedly admitted, “I do it [reclaim deposits] for financial reasons. I’m unemployed (Stockholm focus group 2)”.

6. Discussion

This study has investigated how young adults’ personal accounting plays a role in their participation in a circular scheme relying on financial incentives. The following sections discuss how the findings contribute to two bodies of literature: studies on accounting, and specifically personal accounting, and studies on circular economy.

6.1. Difficulties in making up the individual

This study has investigated a government scheme trying to “make up” the circular consumer by using a deposit-refund incentive to encourage recycling. It builds on previous research within accounting studies showing how agencies seek to impose particular ways of accounting for one’s money onto the domestic sphere (Bay, 2011, 2018; Carnegie & Walker, 2007; Walker, 1998; Walker & Carnegie, 2007). One of the key take-aways of these studies is that accounting practices cannot be disentangled from the ideas underlying them, also sometimes referred to as programmes (Miller, 2008), rationales (Miller & O’Leary, 1990) and earmarking ideologies (Walker, 1998; Walker & Carnegie, 2007).

The reason why authorities attempt to impose certain ways of accounting is most likely because, on an aggregated level, individual behaviours have significant societal impact. Therefore it is perhaps unsurprising that the thrift campaigns studied by Walker (1998) were rolled out during the First World War in a situation of national emergency. Similarly, the type of environmental scheme studied here will most likely become more common given the state of the global environmental problems (cf. Steffen et al., 2015) and the need for intergovernmental (cf. European Commission, 2018) and national regulators to address the environmental problems. In response, schemes emerge that impose earmarking ideologies onto citizens to transform them into environmentally friendly consumers. Individuals can nowadays calculate their personal environmental footprint in tonnes of CO₂ and then translate it into conventional money by paying for carbon offsetting (cf. Lovell et al., 2009).

These schemes thus range from merely relying on citizens’ environmental conscience and calculation of their footprint to explicit monetary incentives, such as a deposit-refund scheme. Consequently, environmental concern is only one of many factors that can induce consumers to recycle, and is often paired with financial incentives (Knickmeyer, 2020). In terms of effectiveness in shaping environmentally friendly consumers, the classic deposit-refund scheme is increasingly seen as the gold standard of “making up” the individual who should return waste (cf. Viscusi et al., 2011; Zhou et al., 2020). It has been suggested that the particular effectiveness of deposit-refund schemes has to do with an “endowment effect”, i.e. that individuals are unwilling to lose money they have deposited (Carlson, 2001).

Since 85 per cent of containers are returned within the Swedish deposit-refund scheme, one could draw the conclusion that the earmarking ideology is working as planned and turning citizens into circular consumers. In contrast, only a few of the studied respondents adopted the scheme’s official earmarking ideology, which reflects the difficulty of imposing ways of accounting onto individuals. This indicates that the endowment effect is an unlikely explanation of the scheme’s success, at least within this group. Thus, despite the studied scheme’s emphasis on monetary incentives and environmental benefit, the scheme only succeeds in making some young adults into circular consumers. In fact, quite a few respondents professed to not returning deposit containers at all, and a large group only do so if they consume the beverage at home. Yet others delegate their responsibility for the used container to someone else who will return it to the reverse vending machine. This finding may seem discouraging, especially in the case of environmental and circular schemes (Hänninen, 1995). However, as Rose and Miller (2010) note, a technique invented for one purpose may find a role for another. It may work without, or even despite, its explicit rationale. For example, although delegating the task of returning containers to others shows that the respondents have not turned into circular consumers, it still serves to close the loop.

The phenomenon of counter earmarking may help explain why the young adults do not adopt the deposit-refund scheme’s official earmarking. As Zelizer (1994) highlights, official earmarking schemes may overlap, compete and collide with individuals’ own earmarking, i.e. their personal accounting. In the present case, the young adults’ personal accounting practices are intensely shaped by their relations. For example, some younger respondents earmark the deposit-refund based on the idea that only parents do grocery shopping. In this way, the young adults’ accounting practices are fundamentally coloured by social ties such as family relations between parents and children, and societal inequalities between rich and poor, as well as by professional economic logics, such as the idea of earning money by reclaiming other people’s deposits.

That these types of social relations – between family members, between social groups, and in economic exchange – are reflected in individuals’ accounting practices resonates with previous studies conducted in other empirical settings (cf. Hayes & O’Brien, 2021; Walker & Carnegie, 2007; Zelizer, 1994) and thus appears to be a general phenomenon. However, exactly how the relations are constructed clearly differs depending on the context, and also changes over time, as the historical studies show (Walker, 1998; Walker & Carnegie, 2007; Zelizer, 1994). Importantly, these cultural and relational aspects shape the individuals’ personal accounting and thus influence how the circular top-down scheme is received and interacted with in practice.

Elaborating on Zelizer’s (1994) observation that official earmarking schemes may overlap and interact with individuals’ earmarking, the present study finds that the official scheme still shapes the young adults’ earmarking in several ways, for example through the fact that the deposit is refunded at a retailer, what the literature calls the Retail Recycling Mode (Zhou et al., 2020), and the monetary format of the refund. Such aspects affected earmarking by use, for example earmarking the refund as money to spend on groceries, and earmarking by system of allocation, for example earmarking the refund as a discount to use in this particular store.

6.2. Consequences of the young adults’ counter earmarking

While the young adults’ counter-earmarking practices are many and varied, particularly when earmarking the refund, the different kinds of earmarking tend to be interrelated. For example, earmarking by source (store discount) may influence earmarking by use (grocery shopping), and earmarking by the system of allocation (refund in cash) is related to another earmarking by use (save for future spending) etc. A national deposit-refund scheme – targeting individuals in various social settings, with different cultural backgrounds and living arrangements – is likely to encounter a broad range of such interrelated kinds of counter earmarking. Despite this fact, all forms of counter earmarking generally had a feature in common, a disconnect between the paid deposit and its refund, and this will be discussed first.

The young adults’ counter earmarking disconnects the paid deposit from its refund and treats the two transactions as fundamentally different. Economic sociologists and psychologists (Cheema & Soman, 2006; Thaler, 1999; Zelizer, 1989) have shown that personal accounting practices can in this way serve to make transactions incommensurate with each other, and this is found to be the case in the present study as well. Moreover, previous studies of personal accounting (Halawa & Olcoń-Kubicka, 2018; Northcott & Doolin, 2000) find that although making sums of money incommensurate in this way contradicts economic principles, such as the fungibility of money, it is not necessarily irrational. Reserving the money placed in various accounts for specific purposes can be a deliberate practice and serve the purpose of self-discipline.

In the case of the studied young adults, the respondents’ earmarking also made different sums of money incommensurate by placing them in separate incommensurate accounts. In terms of the deposit-refund transactions, this practice appeared to be mostly unintentional and it only served the purpose of self-discipline for a few. For many, the disconnect between the paid deposit and its refund instead seemed to encourage spending. Thus, when accounting makes sums of money incommensurate it can serve the purposes of both self-disciplined thrift and frivolous expense. The question of when and how it is used for one purpose or another, its malleability (Cheema & Soman, 2006), requires further study. One can of course argue that young adults may differ from other age groups in this sense. However, Thaler (1999) finds that adults’ earmarking practices follow similar patterns.

The fact that the young adults earmark the paid deposit and its refund as two separate transactions, as incommensurate, has consequences for the studied scheme. For example, earmarking the paid deposit as part of the price interferes with the system by limiting the size of the deposit sum. By earmarking the deposit sum as part of the price, consumers fail to recognise that they are depositing money that will be returned, which makes it difficult to increase the size of the deposit. Indeed, it is known from previous literature that a high deposit sum is likely to increase the packaging recovery rate, though at the expense of beverage sales (Zhou et al., 2020).

Another way that this counter earmarking interferes with the official system is by turning the purchase and return into two disconnected practices. The person who purchases the beverage does not necessarily return the used container.¹¹ For many, this meant that they made the purchase but think that some other person should do the return, someone in need of the small sums of money involved, or someone who goes grocery shopping and can use a discount. Because of this, the deposit containers may take a detour in between consumption and recycling, which opens up a role for intermediaries within the system. In the family, the children may take on this intermediary role, conducting the return for others. As children grow into young adults, they are more likely to let parents take on this role and, when not at home, they let waste pickers and beggars do it, as discussed in 6.3.

From the perspective of the circular economy literature, these counter-earmarking practices can perhaps be understood as examples of cognitive bias (Singh & Giacosa, 2019) or consumer attitudes (Maitre-Ekern & Dalhammar, 2019; Sijtsema et al., 2020), things that may hinder the circular economy and which circular, top-down schemes typically aim to overcome (Mylan et al., 2016; Nemat et al., 2019; Singh & Giacosa, 2019). In this context, the study finds that counter-earmarking practices are prevalent and probably difficult to overcome. Moreover, despite the young adults’ counter earmarking, the used containers are generally still returned and recycled, though not by the consumers. Thus some consumers’ lack of recycling activity is compensated by that of intermediaries, such as waste pickers or family members. The findings thus show that consumer behaviour that is at odds with the top-down scheme does not necessarily hinder the circular economy, and may in fact still result in circular flows.

6.3. The role of the informal economy

The present study further finds that informal add-on systems may emerge and even become more popular than the ones organised by the official system. Particularly in the case of donating deposits to charity, the informal systems – donating to beggars or the local hockey team – were more important to the young adults than the official donation options within Returpack’s system.

The young adults discussed how beggars, many of whom are poor EU migrants (Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, 2017), position themselves outside grocery stores to collect beverage containers. Other authors have called persons performing such a role in an informal waste economy “waste pickers”, a phenomenon that has been observed in places such as Bangladesh (Bari et al., 2012), South America (Gutberlet et al., 2017) and the USA (Gowan, 1997). As Bari et al. (2012) describe, the practice requires no financial investment, and the money they earn is entirely their own, characteristics that tend to attract the poor. According to the same study, each waste picker can collect many kilos of waste per day, a substantial contribution that is not always recognised in the circular economy (Barford & Ahmad, 2021). Indeed, Ashenmiller’s (2011) survey in Santa Barbara South Coast shows that less than 50 per cent of the recyclable material returned for a refund is returned by the household that originally purchased the material and paid the deposit. The author argues that the deposit-refund scheme thereby significantly redistributes money towards deposit scavengers.

While there are no such statistics on how many containers are returned by non-consumers for the purpose of earning money in the Swedish system, the findings show that many young adults have experience of collecting others’ used containers when young, and that, in their current situation, it is common for them to rely on other waste pickers to return their own used containers. Thus this is a plausible explanation of the deposit-refund system’s high return rate. While the circular economy literature has recently recognised the reliance on waste pickers and their role in reverse logistics, it is still typically seen as a phenomenon restricted to low- or middle-income countries (cf. Barford & Ahmad, 2021).

To some extent, the official organiser of the deposit-refund system, Returpack, recognises these informal add-on systems and even encourages them. Recently, Returpack has added specific tubes to rubbish bins in cities such as Stockholm. Consumers can leave their used container in these tubes, which facilitates the young adults’ behaviour of leaving used containers next to rubbish bins so that waste pickers can find them. Returpack also allows non-profit organisations, such as local sports clubs, to register with them and awards an annual prize to the non-profit that has collected the most containers.

There are a few differences between these two add-on systems, one of which concerns who they redistribute the deposit money to. In the case of the non-profits, the young adults tend to donate their paid deposits to a charity from which they themselves will benefit, such as their local sports club. In this sense, the deposit-refund scheme redistributes money from the beverage consumers to local non-profit operations. In the case of beggars, the deposit redistributes money to people who ask for it. If one donates directly to a beggar, one knows who will benefit, but if one leaves it on top of a rubbish bin, it goes to the first waste picker who passes by. Another difference has to do with the social associations of the two add-on systems. As seen in the findings, the association between recycling containers and beggars and waste pickers could have a negative impact on recycling behaviour, as certain individuals worry about being seen as poor or even greedy if they collect deposits. Giving the deposit containers to a local non-profit carries no such stigma in this study. On the contrary, it could encourage young males who otherwise do not return deposit containers to do so in this particular setting.

7. Conclusions

This study aims to expand our knowledge of the role of accounting, and particularly personal accounting, within circular schemes. It does so by examining the Swedish deposit-refund system for beverage containers. Addressing both the accounting and circular economy literatures, the present study makes two main contributions.

First, the findings contribute to the research within accounting studies concerned with making up the individual (Bay, 2011, 2018; Carnegie & Walker, 2007; Hänninen, 1995; Miller & O’Leary, 1990, 1993; Walker & Carnegie, 2007). This is done by focusing on a group of individuals, young adults, and examining how they respond to a top-down circular scheme, namely a deposit-refund system for beverage containers. In contrast to indications in previous studies (Walker & Carnegie, 2007), the present study finds that the official scheme rarely succeeds in enforcing its way of earmarking, i.e. for the deposit to be commensurate with its refund. Exploring the young adults’ counter earmarking practices, which in many cases are at odds with the official scheme, the study shows the difficulty of making up circular consumers who will return waste.

The young adults’ counter-earmarking practices typically make the two transactions, deposit-refund, incommensurate. Previous authors (Northcott & Doolin, 2000; Thaler, 1999) found that personal accounting, by making sums of money incommensurate, has a self-constraining effect on action. Thus individuals who do not trust themselves to act in a financially sensible way deliberately make sums of money incommensurate by putting them in separate accounts, for example to save money. The present study indeed finds that personal accounting’s ability to make sums of money incommensurate can serve the purpose of self-constraint, but also finds that it can equally promote indulgence in spontaneous and frivolous spending, at least in the case of young adults. Because the young adults do not recognise the refund as connected to their paid deposit, they treat it like new, extra money which they are likely to spend.

Moreover, and despite the studied scheme’s emphasis on monetary incentives and environmental benefit, the young adults’ accounting is profoundly coloured by social ties such as family relations between parents and children, by societal inequalities between rich and poor, as well as by professional economic logics such as the idea of earning money by returning other people’s containers. The fact that these types of social relations – between family members and social groups and in economic exchange – are reflected in accounting practices resonates with previous studies of personal accounting conducted in other empirical contexts (cf. Hayes & O’Brien, 2021; Walker & Carnegie, 2007; Zelizer, 1994). It also illustrates the resistance that a top-down earmarking ideology may encounter when seeking to intervene in individuals’ accounting practices.

Secondly, while circular top-down schemes typically aim to overcome consumers’ rigid behaviours and cognitive biases that may hinder the circular economy (Mylan et al., 2016; Nemat et al., 2019; Singh & Giacosa, 2019), this study shows how it may be difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to overcome counter earmarking. Despite the young adults’ counter earmarking, the scheme still succeeds in recycling most of the used containers. While many of the young adults do not return their containers, their behaviours – such as giving used containers to beggars, their parents or the hockey team, who return the containers for them – still result in circular material flows. Because of this informal economy, the circular deposit-refund scheme also redistributes money from beverage consumers to deposit collectors. The study thereby underlines the importance of informal economies and waste pickers for the circular economy’s reverse supply chain, an aspect that has only received scant attention, but may in fact be key to the success of deposit-refund schemes (Ashenmiller, 2011; Barford & Ahmad, 2021; Gutberlet et al., 2017).

The study also has relevance for practice. As financial incentives are widely used for return logistics within a circular economy (Knickmeyer, 2020; Östlin et al., 2008) such as this one, the findings may prove valuable when designing future circular economy initiatives. The findings show that how the deposit-refund system is set up, e.g. how it allocates and restricts the use of money, influences whether, when and how the young adults participate in the circular deposit-refund system. Because of this fact, it would be interesting for future studies to investigate deposit-refund systems with a Reverse Logistics Mode, which locates the refund with the producer, or a Repo Recycling Mode, which locates the refund at the recycling centre (Zhou et al., 2020).

This study has focused on a particular age group, young adults, and one should be careful when generalising from these results to other consumer groups in other countries. However, earmarking or personal accounting has been observed among modern adults (Cheema & Soman, 2006; Thaler, 1999), in earlier times (Zelizer, 1994) and within Indigenous economies (Douglas, 1967), which indicates that it is a general phenomenon. Moreover, deposit-refund systems for beverage containers, like the one studied here, exist in more than 40 countries (Zhou et al., 2020). The insights from this study should be valuable both for those managing existing systems and for those implementing new deposit-refund systems. Future studies in this area could, for example, further investigate how informally organised add-on systems appear and develop.

The study also shows that personal accounting practices vary with financial status and cultural background. The deposit money’s association with people in need is one example of how the respondents’ cultural background matters. Consequently, future studies could, like Zelizer (1994), focus on personal accounting within a specific income bracket or within various social settings to gain further in-depth knowledge.

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).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS: [grant number: 2019-02233].

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., 2017, p. 371).

2 Walker and Carnegie (2007, 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 (1991), like Thaler (1999), 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, 1999, 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., 2020).

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.

7 https://www.fi.se/contentassets/5b622c8e76f04dbfaf390f2a72367052/hushallsundersokning-2020-pm_eng.pdf.

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, 2020), 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.