Packaging designs aimed at boosting recycling rates and reducing the prevalence of single-use plastics are destined to fail unless they help to change people's behaviour, writes Matt Millington.

No one is particularly happy when they find out there's plastic waste on Mount Everest, or in the deep oceans, or in human blood. It's not controversial to say that we need to stop churning the stuff out and throwing it away.
One way for businesses to tackle single-use plastics is to design their packaging to be reusable, but so far efforts have not succeeded at scale.
For example, reusable McDonald's cups are only getting a 40 per cent return rate from customers in Germany, despite consumers paying a ?2 deposit. When Starbucks trialled reusable cups in the closed environment of its Seattle HQ, where returning them is presumably straightforward, the return rate still didn't exceed 80 per cent. We weren't exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups
It's not that we don't care: research suggests consumer motivation towards environmentally positive behaviour is high. It's that as a society we have developed an expectation of convenience: to have what we want, when we want it, without any consequences.
This is entirely unreasonable ? we weren't exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups ? but while it persists, consumers are very unlikely to switch to reusable alternatives if it puts them o...