For 20 years, China has been promoting waste sorting for recycling. The truth is, no one bothers. The objective is to get people to realise that they have been practising poor methods of trash disposal and change their attitude towards recycling.

A social experiment that proves people in China know how to sort the trash for recycling; it’s just that they were never bothered to do so. We redesigned standard recycling trashcans into an installation that makes people inadvertently declare their IQ level based on how well they separate the trash.

We placed this installation at Shanghai’s busiest food street and observed the crowd. As people stood in front of the IQ Trashcans, it made them self-conscious that they were about to be labeled as smart or dumb in an instant. Every single person stopped to carefully consider the correct bin to dispose his or her trash – a phenomenon never seen before.

All it took was a simple reskinning of the standard recycling bins. The installation was divided into 3 categories, each catering to people of different IQ groups as indicated by labels. Those who chose to sort the trash correctly technically declared their IQ to be of the highest level. Likewise, those who chose not to would have inadvertently declared themselves to have low IQ.

We carried out this experiment at one of Shanghai’s busiest food street where there is a high volume of trash disposal such as food waste and paper wrappings. And we observed the crowd. Every single person stopped to carefully consider the correct bin to dispose his or her trash.