Breaking the default: overcoming plastic cutlery habits
What unsustainable behavior needs to change:
Lebanon faces significant challenges in managing plastic waste due to a high rate of plastic consumption and inadequate waste management infrastructure. Around 11% to 13% of the Municipal Solid Waste generated in Lebanon consists of plastics. Although some of it is recycled, most is either landfilled or openly dumped and incinerated.
Despite the harmful effects of plastic on the environment, most restaurants continue to provide plastic cutlery with their delivery orders by default, even when customers may not necessarily need or want it. Concurrently, customers do not usually care to ask for the exclusion of cutlery. As such, unutilised plastic cutlery is discarded, resulting in unnecessary (yet avoidable) environmental costs.
There are several biases and bottlenecks that prevent customers from opting-out of receiving plastic cutlery, even when they do not need it. Most customers are susceptible to the status-quo bias (the tendency to stick with the current state of affairs, i.e., the default inclusion of plastic cutlery), or social norms bias (the tendency to follow what others are doing), or to cognitive overload (although they care about the environment, it may not occur to them to request the exclusion of cutlery from their meals because they are focused on other tasks).
The Green Nudge:
Nudge Lebanon implemented a small-scale pre-post intervention at the call-centre of a local restaurant to examine the impact of using a verbal prompt to change the status-quo. The prompt was designed to provide an active choice, in case customers wished to opt-out of receiving plastic cutlery. Moreover, the prompt was framed to highlight the restaurant’s efforts in preserving the environment, thereby priming customers to act in an environmentally responsible way.
The prompt was delivered in Arabic and read as follows: “In order to preserve the environment, we are encouraging our customers to reduce the use of plastic, which is why we would like to ask you if you wish to have plastic cutlery with your order.” The call centre staff were instructed to deliver the prompt before each order was concluded. A monitoring system was put into place to ensure that data was consistently and accurately recorded, and that customers who opted-out of having plastic cutlery did not receive it.
The result: a nearly 78% decrease in the demand for plastic cutlery with delivery orders compared to baseline.
Are you aware of any other nudges that help to cut-down plastic usage? Feel free to comment or get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com
From Nudge Lebanon which is a non-governmental and non-profit initiative, working to apply behavioural insights to policy challenges. They use rigorous experimental approaches and tools typically used in the field of behavioural economics, such as randomised controlled trials.
Reframing veggie dishes: The soy steak that became the summer plate
What unsustainable behavior needs to change:
Liseberg, Sweden’s largest amusement park, aims to become a global leader in sustainable park operations by 2025. A key milestone in this endeavour is minimising the climate impact of food and beverage sales.
The Swedisch Behaviour Lab (Beteendelabbet) was hired to examine and investigate how nudging and behavioural design could be used to increase the sale of vegetarian food at one of the park’s restaurants called Café Taube.
The Behavior Lab discovered three key insights by analysing and exploring the decision-making environment of customers, as well as conducting interviews and observing customer behaviour:
- The menu placed outside the restaurant only displayed meat and fish dishes
- Numerous customers experienced “decision stress” and tended to select dishes prominently displayed at the beginning of the menu
- The vegetarian options were depicted as less appealing, being positioned as a mere alternative to meat rather than showcasing their own enticing qualities as delicious dishes
Based on these behavioural insights, The Behavioral Lab developed designs and methods to make it easier and more attractive to choose the vegetarian option.
The Green Nudge:
The nudges were tested in an experiment during Liseberg’s high season in the summer of 2019. Sales data were measured over a period of three weeks before, and three weeks after the implementation of the nudge. Throughout the period, the dishes offered on the menu remained the same. The experiment only changed the names of the vegetarian dishes and the placement on the menu.
To address the issue of vegetarian options being perceived as less attractive due to naming and ingredient descriptions, an experiment was conducted to test a more appealing framing.
For example, „Soy steak“ was renamed „Summer plate“.This was further reinforced by placing the vegetarian dishes at the top of the menu and framing them as „Taube’s favourites“.
The result: the sale of vegetarian dishes at Café Taube increased by 76% and the sales of the Summer Plate, which was previously called Soy steak, increased by 275%.
It is evident once again that to influence pro-environmental behaviour among the mainstream, we must make the sustainable option both easily accessible and enjoyable to choose!
Are you aware of any other nudges that promote environmental-friendly diets? Get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com
The Behavior Lab (Beteendelabbet in Swedish) is the first Swedish consulting firm to use applied behavioural science to tackle societal challenges. For about 10 years they have designed interventions based on their interdisciplinary framework, The Behavioral Journey, which combines psychology, service design, and behavioural economics for a wide range of industries and organisations. Their framework was published in their book, Nudging in Practice – How Organisations Make It Easier to Do the Right Thing, in 2019.