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.