What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

Deutsche See, renowned for its fresh and frozen fish and seafood, faced a recurring issue: employees habitually left the refrigeration unit doors open during operations, resulting in increased energy consumption as the cooling systems had to work harder.

As we’ve seen in our previous nudge, the ‘radiator paint’ in public buildings developed for the City of Copenhagen – people often fail to change unsustainable behaviour when unable to assess abstract factors; such as temperature increase and subsequent energy waste.

For employees working in the refrigeration units at Deutsche See, the consequences of temperature increases and the associated energy implications remain intangible and often go unnoticed.

The Green Nudge:

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

India used to have a significant issue with the habitual practice of open defecation, which led to the contamination of drinking and bathing water. To address this issue, the Government of India initiated the Swachh Bharat Mission or Clean India Mission in 2014. The country-wide campaign aims to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management, promoting a cleaner and healthier environment for all.

The Kumbh Mela is one of the world’s largest religious festivals, attracting around 200 million people over 55 days. However, in terms of sustainability, the festival presents unique challenges – particularly regarding open defecation and water waste.

The Green Nudge:

To effectively address the issue of open defecation, the organisers of the 2019 Kumbh Mela festival incorporated behavioural insights to implement a proactive solution. They recognized that breaking unsustainable habits can be difficult, therefore, they developed an action plan that taps into various nudge tactics; namely encouraging individuals to use toilets instead of practising open defecation.

Default: The organisers strategically placed toilets near religious sites to make them more convenient and comfortable than when openly defecating. This approach is an example of a default option, where the preferred behaviour is made the standard and more attractive than the alternative. Establishing a new default option is an effective means of influencing the hierarchy of choice for individuals and thus promoting positive habits. By making the preferred behaviour the default as well as a more attractive choice, individuals are more likely to adopt it. 

Feedback: In addition to the default nudge, the organisers installed over 122,500 eco-friendly „smart toilets“ to cater to the needs of pilgrims and tourists. These toilets were equipped with sensors that provide immediate feedback to users on their water usage. By making the abstract (amount of water used) more concrete, this encouraged visitors to be mindful of their behaviour. The smart toilets incentivized water conservation by displaying information such as the amount of water used for flushing and handwashing.

The result: 9,888 MT of waste collected during the Kumbh Mela 2019, sent to Baswar solid waste treatment plant for scientific disposal, ensuring zero waste disposal in Ganga or Mela area.

This approach can be replicated in other contexts throughout India to effectively address the issue of open defecation and therein promote sustainable practices.

Are you aware of any other nudges that help to establish more sustainable habits? Get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com

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: Well, I confess it: I used to brush my teeth during a long, hot shower. It just felt comforting and self-indulging. But it started to feel wrong- to waste so much water and energy. But wait, was it a lot? How much water and energy is needed for a shower? Does it make a big difference if I shower for 2, 5 or 10 minutes? I had no clue, because it was too abstract. 

In most households the shower is the 2nd biggest energy consumer (after heating). In Germany, people spend between 8-12 minutes under a running hot shower with 40°C (104°F). That means approximately 20% of the total energy used to heat water and ~16 liters of water per minute. 

In order to saving energy, we could either shower shorter or reduce the temperature of the water. The first problem here: showering is extremely habitual and the shower is also the place where your mind wanders and you forget time easily. The second problem: although reducing the temperature by 2-3°C would make a difference, guessing the temperature is as inaccurate as trying to hear the decibel of a winter car tire. 

What we need is a feedback mechanism that makes the abstract energy and water consumption more concrete, more salient. Something that nudges people into shorter and colder showers.

The Green Nudge: Swiss company Amphiro came up with a digitally enabled behavioural intervention: a smart shower meter that provides real-time feedback of your energy and water consumption during the shower. 

Researchers from the ETH Zürich and the University of Bamberg conducted a natural field experiment with an uninformed sample of guests at 6 Swiss hotels (265 rooms, N = 19,596 observations). 

The rooms were equipped with smart shower meters in their hotel rooms. The devices measured the energy and water consumption of every shower taken, and displayed feedback on each ongoing shower in real time. 

Information that was shown on the display:

• total water consumption in liters, 
• total energy use in kWh, 
• a dynamic rating of the current energy-efficiency class (A–G) and 
• a four-stage animation of a polar bear standing on a gradually melting ice floe 

The result: a large and significant energy-conservation effect of 11.4% or 0.215 kWh per shower (vs control group that was shown only temperature).

While this does not fully translate to household settings, it demonstrates that feedback can be an impactful nudge to preserve resources like energy and water. Especially when you scale this up for a larger group.

Full article in Nature.

What unsustainable behavior needs to change: In 2013 when the Green Party in Germany demanded a veggie/vegan day in company, school or university canteens, the outcry was massive: “Cancel culture.” “Don’t take away our freedom!” “Political paternalism!”. The idea was not only to create awareness for a diet with less meat but to directly reduce emissions.

However we need to recognize that meat consumption is a big driver for CO2 emissions that expedites  global warming. Western Europeans eat 10x more meat than people living in India. Eating meat has societal as well as personal consequences: A fat-heavy diet often leads to obesity and severe health issues like heart attacks.

The problem: most often the negative externalities of meat consumption are hidden. Most people don’t know how much CO2 emission their steak is responsible for how a meat dish compares to a veggie option.

So the question is: how can we become choice architects that just nudges a decision instead of telling people what to do.

The Green Nudge: In a joint effort the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Aalto University wanted to examine if making negative environmental impacts like CO2 emissions more salient, would nudge people to adapt their choices.

In a 10 day field experiment in one of the biggest university canteens in Munich with over 8.000 visitors (during that 10 day time period), the researchers introduced menu displays showing the food option but also the environmental externalities like the CO2 footprint

The interesting bit: their experimental design included testing different options of how to visualize the negative footprint.

Variables were:
➡ the negative cost in €
➡ the amount of an individual’s daily CO2 budget spent
➡ the amount of CO2 emissions

They introduced traffic light colors: green for dishes with low CO2 emissions, yellow for more emissions and red for the “climate-killer-lunch”.

The result: the demand decreased for CO2-intensive choices with meat and fish and thus reduced the footprint of the total lunch menu. The researchers could observe the biggest effect when visitors learned how much environmental cost (in €) their lunch would cause. So making something intangible more salient resulted in almost 10% less CO2 emissions compared to days when they didn’t show any negative environmental impact on the menu displays.

What unsustainable behavior needs to change: According to the Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP) we waste a staggering amount of 88 million tons of food every year because of the expiration date. So, we are wasting food only because a print on the product says it has reached its end of shelf life- even if it was still good to consume.

The thing is: it’s often hard to say if food has gone bad or not. Of course there is the good old: “Look, smell, taste” but obviously this proves difficult for packaged food. It is hard to tell if food is safe to eat beyond the expiration date, unless you see some nasty mold on it. The process of decay is extremely abstract and people – when in doubt – prefer to  play it safe and throw it away. This is not only valid for people in front of their fridge. For retailers, it has a significant cost effect. When a product nears it’s expiration date, it often will go on discount or is thrown out. 

So one tool to reduce food waste would be something that makes the abstract more concrete. Some mechanism that extends the product and shelf life. If only the food or packaging could talk and stop this unsustainable behaviour.

The Green Nudge: To address this challenge, salient feedback can be a great nudge to trigger action. Feedback coming from the product. More precisely: from the packaging. 

London-based start-up Mimica came up with a game-changing, bio-inspired packaging innovation. Their Bump products are temperature-sensitive, dynamic expiry labels for food or beverages. The labels – coming a tag or cap – contain a gel filling that goes from smooth to bumpy at the same pace as the food inside deteriorates. This way they provides accurate, real-time feedback of the product’s freshness with a tactile interface. 

Mimica founder Solveiga Pakštaitė was inspired by the banana skin transformation which changes its colour and texture as it ripens. One of nature’s great ways to provide feedback: green = don’t eat, yellow = eat, turning brown = hurry, it will go bad soon.