How children’s drawings can reduce illegal waste dumping
What unsustainable behavior needs to change:
The annual waste report for the Dutch municipality of Dordrecht sheds light on a specific behavioural issue: the frequent illegal dumping of bulky waste near underground containers in the Prinsessenbuurt neighbourhood of Nieuw-Krispijn. This behaviour has had significant consequences for the neighbourhood’s liveability and the efficiency of the waste removal process.
The Green Nudge:
In collaboration with Rijkswaterstaat and the municipality of Dordrecht, Shift Gedrag developed an effective solution to reduce this undesirable behaviour and promote a more sustainable approach to waste management.
The strategy, which they’ve positioned as „The Green Nudge,“ included multiple interventions:
- Container Wraps with Children’s Drawings: A design competition for children from Prinses Julianaschool, using the winning drawings to decorate the underground containers. This resulted in increased ownership and reduced anonymity.
- Thank You Sign: Informational signs with the message, „Thank you for keeping the container areas clean!“ This sign served as a reminder of the respective behaviour desired and made people aware of their civic responsibility.
- Sidewalk Instructions: This strategy used text and images on the sidewalk near the containers, including contact information for scheduling pickup appointments – to ensure people had quick access to information about bulky waste.
- Flyers: Clean neighbourhood coaches distributed flyers to inform residents about the intervention and waste disposal options; including translations in various languages to enhance accessibility.
- WhatsApp Trial: As part of the pilot, residents could have bulky waste picked up by simply sending a WhatsApp message to HVC. This lowered the threshold for scheduling a pickup appointment.
The results:
- Bulky Waste: After the implementation of the intervention, incidents of illegal dumping of bulky waste near the underground containers decreased by a remarkable 85%. Conclusively representing a significant behavioural change.
- Residual Waste: Incidents of illegally dumped bags of residual waste also decreased by 54%, indicating a positive trend toward more sustainable waste management.
- Plastic Waste: While the results for illegally dumped bags of plastic waste were not yet significant, there was a promising decrease in the intervention area. No comparable improvement was observed at the control site.
Are you aware of any other nudges that that reduce littering? Feel free to get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com
From psychologist Roos Alink who is a director at Dutch Shift Gedrag. Shift Gedrag helps governmental organisations to make the Netherlands more sustainable and safe with behavioural insights.
“The Button Nudger” makes you push the right button
What unsustainable behavior needs to change:
Toilets are more and more equipped with a dual-flush option. While the design varies widely between different manufacturers, the principle remains the same. There is an option to flush with a full flush (generally supposed to flush faeces) and an option to flush with a partial flush (generally supposed to flush liquids). One of the designs often seen is that of a small and a big button next to each other. While many people have learned to understand that big button = big flush and small button = small flush, this does not hold true from a nudging point of view.
Considering that biologically speaking, the small flushing button should be used considerably more often than the big flushing button, the nudging principles of option composition (as identified by Mertens et al. 2022) and more specifically sizing (as identified by Wee et al. 2021) are not adhered to. This is to say that the big flushing button draws more attention than the small button at the generally short decision-making time when picking a flushing button. This consequently leads to excessive use of that big flushing button. Using a full flush with often twice the amount of water as a partial flush when it isn’t necessary is a wasteful use of freshwater and should be prevented as much as possible.
The Green Nudge:
To address this issue right at the moment of decision-making prior to flushing the toilet, Chiel Verstappen developed an interactive prototype known as „The Button Nudger.“
An unmissable message was presented to the toilet user just before flushing: the nudge text (see image) – based on the principle of conveying the norm (as per Byerly et al. 2018), was humoristic by design and had the added benefit of informing users who are not at all familiar with the dual-flush setup. In users who are familiar, it obviously acted as a gentle reminder to perform a certain action (in this case, consider the small flushing button if it would suffice) as is often the case in nudging. Next to a textual cue, an additional cue based on coloured lighting (centred around the influence of colour on mood/feeling) was given to aid the message.
The result: The pilot test showed that “The Button Nudger” did have an influence on flushing behaviour. Some toilets showed greater effect than others, with a maximum water reduction of 10.7% and an average water reduction of 6.17%. Taking the average water reduction, a yearly water reduction of 3,180 litres per toilet could be achieved at the University of Twente.
Find the full abstract here.
Are you aware of any other nudges that help to conserve water? Feel free to comment or get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com
From Chiel Verstappen who is a current graduate student pursuing a Creative Technology degree at the University of Twente. In his bachelor’s assignment, Chiel skillfully merged his interests in sustainable resource utilisation with his keen fascination for behavioural influence and adept technological knowledge.