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We estimate behavioral spillovers from environmental policy within the context of a natural experiment on food waste in Sweden. Exploiting the staggered implementation of food-waste collection across Swedish municipalities, we use a difference-in-difference design to measure the causal effect of introducing such collection on another pro-environmental behavior, namely the sorting of packaging waste. Results suggest a positive spillover effect on packaging waste which corresponds to 5–10% of the population average and rises gradually over time, possibly due to slow implementation of food-waste collection in many municipalities. These estimates are unconfounded with a number of shifts in the waste-related incentives facing households, e.g. introduction of curbside collection of packaging waste from single-family homes. Although we are unable to directly account for all such factors, indirect robustness tests provide no compelling evidence that estimated spillovers are spurious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the behavioral spillover effect of organic waste sorting on households' waste reduction. We use an administrative household-level dataset on residential waste from a Swedish municipality. To identify the spillover effects, we utilize a natural experiment triggered by the staggered implementation of a policy that introduced home-based organic waste sorting bins. We find a substantial positive spillover effect of waste sorting on waste reduction. The effect, however, disappears over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]