Online Exchange Potential Impact - Wrap

Generally respondents would consider giving items to charitable collections/outlets (25%) or giving to
friends and family (22%). This was followed by taking to the local household waste recycling centre
(HWRC) (17%) and taking to a second hand shop (11%). The items taken to the HWRC may be
disposed of, recycled or taken by an onsite reuse centre, so it does not necessarily mean the item
would be sent to landfill if taken to an HWRC.
Only 3% of the responses related to disposal of items through the refuse collection, though it is
reasonable to suppose that the survey results have understated kerbside refuse as a potential
disposal route, with some respondents perhaps feeling reluctant to state that they would dispose of
items in a wasteful manner. We can expect that intended offline routes of disposal may vary by
ACORN category (as discussed in Section 7.4), since other research has shown that the
disposal/recycling behaviour of different ACORN categories varies in relation to kerbside disposal and
recycling. 12 The results do seem to indicate, in any case, that the total additional reuse that can be
attributed to the use of online sites is markedly lower than the total quantities of reuse that are
actually found to be occurring through the monitoring that was carried out and has already been
presented in this report. Additional reuse would appear likely to occur in only around 10–15% of
cases (including some of the responses giving bulky collection and use of HWRCs as likely alternatives
as well as kerbside refuse collection). This assumes that the proportion of responses involving
disposal to residual waste suggested in Figure 7.3 does offer a reasonable proportion of online
exchanges that would otherwise have been disposed of. As already explained, the true displacement
rate would involve a more detailed investigation of alternative options and how likely it is that each
would be used in any one instance.
This survey question was not constrained to investigating a respondent’s actual history of offline
disposal (or recycling/reuse) of various items, and therefore the responses often relate to the
aspirations of the respondents, rather than indicating their actual behaviour.
There could be an impact on the results arising from a respondent’s understanding of the terminology
used in the question. From a respondent’s point of view there could well be some degree of overlap
of charitable collections and second hand shops, which has not been brought out through the survey.
The distinction between the two alternatives could be subjective, depending on what individual
respondents consider to be charitable collection/outlets or second hand shops. It would seem sensible
to assume that in some less affluent areas, all second hand shops are also charitable outlets.
12 Resource Futures on behalf of WRAP, Waste Compositional Analysis by ACORN Category, 2011 (unpublished at the time of
writing).
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