Greening some consumption behaviours: Do new routines require agency and reflexivity?

During the mid-1990s, most Belgian municipalities and communes encouraged citizens to sort their household waste by providing them with new and varied facilities: collection of recyclables, bottle banks, garbage scales, sensitization campaigns and so on. The change in behaviours was massive and rapid: for example, in 2002, the rate of recycling of packaging waste was as high as 70 per cent in Belgium, while the mean for the fifteen former European Union member states was 54 per cent (EEA, 2005).1