Improving households’ waste and recycling behavior is essential for achieving sustainable production patterns. However, the potential for sustainable waste service offerings remains untapped as existing research largely relies on estimated data, short study periods, and unscalable interventions. We conducted a longitudinal field study to investigate the influence of a scalable, app-based behavioral intervention building on social norms on households’ waste and recycling behavior in a multi- residential setting. Using ‘smart’ waste chutes equipped with novel technology to collect objective data for municipal waste (MMW), plastic waste (PW) and newspaper waste (NPW) of 153 households over the course of 12 months, we find that while MMW levels remain stable and do not differ between households that did (vs. did not) install the waste-oriented smartphone app, recycling rates of PW and NPW increased for all households as a function of the intervention. Moreover, app users threw significantly more PW than households not using the app after but not before the intervention. Together, our results suggest that digital behavioral interventions based on novel data through ‘smart’ technologies can significantly improve households’ waste and recycling behavior, thereby presenting a pathway for increasing the service character of waste disposal and management that enables customers’ sustainability practices.