What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

Radiators in public buildings such as schools, libraries, etc. are often wasting energy in rooms that are not being occupied or where windows are opened. 

According to a study conducted by the Department of Energy and Climate Change in the UK, leaving a single window open overnight during winter can increase heating energy consumption by up to 8%. This means, if a person’s heating bill for the winter is $1000, leaving the window open for one night could potentially cost an additional $80.

The core problem: People cannot see if the radiator is hot, medium, or cold making it difficult to know if they should turn down the valve. 

The Krukow consultants worked together with the city of Copenhagen to investigate what kind of nudge solutions could be developed to reduce heat waste from radiators. 

The findings can be transferred to both companies and private households. 

Here is what Krukow found:

1. The main behavioural barrier for turning off a radiator when i.e., opening a window is lack of visual feedback. When opening a window, we pay little attention to the radiator and forget to put a hand on it to feel if it is hot or cold. 
2. There is nothing in the visual design of the radiator reminding people to check the heat of the radiator before opening the window.
3. When a window is open near a warm radiator, the heat goes up to compensate for the drop in room temperature making the heat of the radiator instantly increase even more. 

In a nutshell: People often fail to change unsustainable behaviour when unable to assess abstract factors like room temperature or air circulation.

The Green Nudge:

Krukow came up with the idea to add heat-sensitive paint to radiators, changing colour from blue to red to provide visual temperature feedback. 

When a radiator in a room compensates for a drop in temperature by increasing heat output, the heat-sensitive paint on the radiator’s surface reacts to the immediate increase in temperature by changing colour. This colour shift provides an immediate visual cue to pupils, employees or visitors in public buildings, indicating when to turn off the radiator. This way the City of Copenhagen could effectively reduce energy waste and save money on heating bills.

Visual feedback, like the blue stripe on a baby’s diaper or a razorblade’s colour change, makes the abstract concrete and is a great way to trigger behaviour change, as demonstrated by the radiator paint example.

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

For decades, consumption has been celebrated as a sign of wealth, with little regard for the consequences. Western societies have especially become throwaway cultures, ignoring the pollution, hazardous working conditions, or CO2 emissions resulting from increasing consumption. For many years we didn’t consider the impact that our choices have on the environment and other people, such as buying fashion, cars, or meat.

But research from the Economist Intelligence Unit indicates that consumers actively seek information about the climate impact of the products they buy: since 2016, the number of Google searches for sustainable goods has risen by 71% worldwide.

Unfortunately, they often lack information about a products‘ sustainability, such as its carbon footprint. This information gap can hinder consumers‘ ability to make informed choices and support sustainable practices.

Grocery shopping can be especially challenging, with numerous products to evaluate and little time to do so. It is impractical for consumers to i.e. assess the carbon footprint of each product and its alternatives all on the shelf.

The Green Nudge:

To address this challenge, the Norwegian online supermarket, Oda, introduced an innovative solution to simplify climate-friendly shopping. They created a “climate receipt” that displays the price of purchased food items as well as their CO2 emissions.

In order to better show customers how much or how little is, say, 2.7 kg of CO2 per kilogram, they grouped all products into four different emissions categories: low, medium, high and very high – illustrated with the colours green, yellow, orange and red. Oda’s emissions data was sourced from Cicero (Centre for International Climate Research), a Norwegian centre for climate research that calculates emissions over the whole lifecycle of a product. Customers can thus see the impact of their product choices on the planet, and given that Oda gives this information for all purchases, they can also monitor how their own behaviour is changing.

The “climate receipt” allows consumers to make different choices: since they launched the climate receipt, meat sales have dropped – whereas sales of meat alternatives have grown by 80%, with customers buying 50% more fruit and vegetables. This demonstrates once again that customers will adopt more climate-friendly behaviours if you make their environmental impact more salient.