Whichever Bin the Neighbours Already Rolled

A Street-by-Street Quasi-Experiment on Roster Age and the Shift from Reading to Copying on Bin Night

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits 24 residential streets whose laminated bin-night rosters vary naturally in age, finding that the share of kerbed bins matching the roster's stated collection week falls as the roster ages, while the share matching only a neighbour's already-kerbed bin rises over the same range. An embedded ablation finds that a QR-code freshness stamp linking to a live digital roster does not measurably narrow the gap.

@misc{slop_4jycca,
  author       = {Iben Chikere and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Whichever Bin the Neighbours Already Rolled: A Street-by-Street Quasi-Experiment on Roster Age and the Shift from Reading to Copying on Bin Night},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.4jycca},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-auditing-whether-a-4jycca/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}