Khadeeja Osman, Sustainability and Engagement Lead at Bristol Waste Company, breaks down why trust is often the most overlooked asset by local authorities.
Residents know they should recycle, they’ve heard about reuse, most, if asked, would tell you they care about the environment. And yet contamination rates persist, behaviour change campaigns plateau, and the same communities are still hard to reach.
This isn’t because they lack awareness, it’s because they don’t trust the messenger. Whilst ‘trust’ is less visible than a fleet of collection vehicles or a network of reuse shops, it still counts as infrastructure that does the same job: it makes the system work.
Without trust, even the most carefully designed service or campaign will hit a wall. But with it, you can ask people to do slightly more inconvenient things for the greater good, and they will.
The gap between knowing and doing
It’s easy to look at low recycling or high contamination rates and conclude that what is needed is more communication. A better leaflet. A louder campaign. But in communities where trust in public institutions is low, the problem isn’t information: it’s credibility.
An important trend is the overlap between the economically disadvantaged and those with a feeling of being underserved and let down by public services. This combination creates a perception that institutions aren’t to be trusted.
When a resident who has repeatedly raised service concerns sees a new leaflet land through their letterbox, the message received isn’t ‘please recycle differently’, it’s ‘they still don’t understand us’. That gap between what we intend to communicate and what is heard is a gap of trust.
The circular economy agenda is rightly becoming more ambitious, and we are asking residents not just to sort their bins but to change how they shop, repair rather than replace, and participate in local circular systems. These are bigger behavioural asks, which require a bigger reserve of trust to get that change to happen.
Trust: What builds it, and what destroys it
Bristol, where I’m based, is a progressive city with a strong environmental identity, which creates a more receptive starting point for circular economy messaging. However, geography or civic identity doesn’t automatically translate into trust in its institutions or its service providers. What builds trust is consistency, visibility, and honesty.
Consistency means showing up repeatedly, over years, with solid messaging and reliable standards. Residents notice when campaigns disappear after a few months. They notice when promises aren’t kept. That’s why delivering on what you said matters.
Bristol Waste Company’s reuse shops are about to hit 500,000 items sold or donated. This isn’t just a headline statistic; it’s visible, accumulated proof that the infrastructure exists and works. That kind of long-term track record reinforces the messages that campaigns are trying to communicate and turns them into something residents can actually see and experience.
Visibility is about making our outcomes tangible to residents. In the waste and resource sector, we talk a lot about communicating inputs: what residents should do, how often and when. We’re less consistent about closing the loop and telling people what happened to the items they donated, what difference their behaviour change made and what the data showed.
Behaviour change theory is clear on this: feedback drives repetition. If residents can see the results of their actions, they’re more likely to repeat them. In Bristol, we’ve made this a priority. Each year, we publish data on how much recyclable material ends up in our general waste bins.
This isn’t intended to shame residents but rather, let them in on the impact of their own behaviours and reinforce messaging about what goes where and why it matters. We also regularly share our ‘wins’ with our residents, such as the number of items saved from going to waste via our Reuse shops, a number that is only growing because our residents keep showing up.
Honesty about limitations builds trust too as it avoids overpromising, which is sometimes easy to do. Residents don’t always see the tight financial, regulatory and operational constraints that local authorities operate under. When those constraints mean we can’t do what a community is asking for, saying so clearly and explaining why is far better, long-term, than deflecting or overpromising.
Most residents can accept ;we can’t do that right now, and here’s why’ far more readily than they can accept later finding out they were misled.
The harder ask
Repair rather than discard. Borrow rather than buy. Bring items back to the system rather than putting them in a bin. These aren’t just behavioural ‘nudges’, they require residents to reorganise habits, time and sometimes money.
That level of participation can’t come solely from an excellent communications and a behaviour campaign. It comes from a good relationship which is built through years of consistent service delivery, genuine engagement and demonstrated accountability – not just through your communications budget.
It is built through honesty when things go wrong and through demonstrating, over time, that you are genuinely oriented toward the community’s interests rather than your own metrics.
Our sector is rightly focused on infrastructure: reuse networks, repair hubs, circular economy zones. But alongside that physical infrastructure, we need to be equally intentional about building the social infrastructure – relationships, credibility, and shared understanding – that will get people to use it.
This is the harder ask for our sector: to treat trust not as a campaign outcome, but as an operational commitment. That means measuring it, resourcing it and being honest when it’s been eroded.
The organisations that will be most effective in the circular economy won’t just be the ones with the best infrastructure – they’ll be the ones that communities truly believe in.
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