Journal of Applied Psychology 1977, Vol. 62, No. 3, 344-351 Environmental Interventions for Litter Control E. Scott Geller, Jill F. Witmer, and Margaret A. Tuso Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University For two experiments, customers entering a grocery store were given a hand- bill listing specially priced items, and later the disposal locations of handbills left in the store were recorded. Experiment 1 showed that specific disposal instructions at the bottom of the handbill prompted about 30% of 1,146 handbill recipients to use a particular trash receptacle. Of the 1,231 customers who received no antilitter message on their handbill, only 9% disposed of their handbills in one of two available trash receptacles, and this percentage did not increase when other customers received specific disposal instructions within the same time period. In Experiment 2 the store was systematically littered on alternate days with 140 handbills. For the littered-store condition a total of 32 out of 639 handbill recipients disposed of their handbills on the floor. However, when the store was free of handbill litter, only 6 of 616 customers dropped a handbill on the floor. Recent applications of behavioral psychol- ogy have been directed toward controlling ecology-related behaviors. For example, field applications of behavior analysis have been successful in promoting environment clean-up (Burgess, Clark, & Hendee, 1971; Kohlenberg & Phillips, 1973; Powers, Osborne, & Ander- son, 1973), decreasing littering (Finnie, 1971; Geller, 1973, 1975), increasing bus ridership (Everett, Hay ward, & Meyers, 1974), facili- tating recycling programs (Geller, Chaffee, & Ingram, 1975; Ingram & Geller, 1975; Witmer & Geller, 1976), decreasing lawn trampling (Hayes & Cone, in press), and re- ducing energy consumption (Palmer, Lloyd, Portions of Experiment 1 were presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Associa- tion, Atlanta, March 1975; portions of Experiment 2 were presented at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, May 1975. The authors are sincerely grateful for the cooperation and support of the grocery-store managers, cashiers, and bag boys at the A & P and Radford Brothers in Blacksburg, Virginia; for the responsible pro- cedural assistance of the 85 undergraduates in Be- havioral Modification 3020 during the winter quar- ter, 1975; and especially for the supervisory services and data collection of their research assistants Janet Bell, Clarence Rorrer, and Carol Wellington. Requests for reprints should be sent to E. Scott Geller, Department of Psychology, Virginia Poly- technic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061. & Lloyd, in press; Seaver & Patterson, 1976; Winett & Nietzel, 1975). An overwhelming majority of the attempts to control ecology- related behaviors have been designed to in- fluence behaviors related to environmental litter (see review by Tuso & Geller, 1976). The two field experiments described herein follow up results and conclusions of previous litter-control research. In a series of investigations, Geller and his students (Geller, 1973, 1975; Geller, Witmer, & Orebaugh, 1976) studied the be- havioral effects of including antilitter prompts on disposable materials. The basic paradigm for these studies consisted of distributing handbills to incoming patrons of an estab- lishment (e.g., movie theater or grocery store) and recording the eventual disposal locations of each handbill as a. function of the type of antilitter instructions included at the bottom of the handbill. Usually the nature of the antilitter prompt was alternated between ob- servation days. In general, antilitter prompts had little influence on the amount of hand- bill litter, but a 20% to 30% increase in the frequency of desirable handbill disposals occurred when the antilitter instructions specified the location of the trash can(s). Geller (1973) varied the nature of the antilitter message between observation days for some experiments and within observation 344