The debunking sticker that shifts packaging choices

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

Waste from packaging poses a serious environmental problem. The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that there were more than 80 million tons of packaging produced in 2018, with two-thirds of this packaging made of plastic or paper. Once the packaging is no longer in use, some of it is recycled, but much of it ends up in landfills. In 2018 alone, landfilled plastic and paper packaging waste amounted to 10.09 and 6.44 million tons, respectively, accounting for 11% of the total landfilled waste in the United States. 

Despite the potential environmental and financial benefits of reducing excessive packaging, many products remain over-packaged, with layers of superfluous packaging added to the more necessary ones. 

An international research team looked at how consumers respond to such overpackaging, where unnecessary paper is added to plastic. Across eight studies with consumers from the Netherlands, US, and UK, they found that people judge the combination of plastic & paper packaging as MORE eco-friendly than identical plastic packaging without the paper. 

Our brains perceive paper as eco-friendly, while plastic is rather linked to images of polluted oceans. Driven by their biassed environmental friendliness perceptions, consumers are willing to pay more for over-packaged products and are more likely to choose them. 

 

The Green Nudge:

To effectively counter these biassed perceptions, the researchers conducted a study to evaluate the impact of a „minimal packaging“ intervention. 

One group of participants had to choose between granola bars packaged in plastic & paper or in plastic only. Another group of participants also chose between plastic & paper or plastic only packaged bars, but now there was a “minimal packaging” sticker attached to the plastic-only option. 

The result: In the first group, without the intervention, we saw that people were on average more likely to choose the visibly over-packaged plastic & paper granola bar over the plastic only alternative. Importantly, once the “minimal packaging” sticker was added to plastic packaging, this preference was reversed: people became more likely to choose the minimally-packaged granola bar over the over-packaged plastic & paper counterpart.

Find out more in this Harvard Business Review article.

Are you aware of any other nudges that lead to better informed choices? Get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com

 

We are happy to once again feature a Green Nudge study in our series. This one is coming from Tatiana Sokolova (associate professor of marketing at Tilburg University) and her co-authors: Aradhna Krishna (Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan) and Tim Döring (assistant professor of marketing at the Maastricht University).

Carbon labels on restaurant menus can impact food choices

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

What do you envision when you think of fast food or food delivery? Perhaps pizza, burgers, tacos, and döner kebab come to mind. While there are increasingly healthier options available, a significant portion of fast food choices still include meat.

A meat-based diet not only harms your health but also damages our planet. It leads to significantly higher CO2 emissions compared to more sustainable dietary choices. Moreover, fast food entails various negative externalities, including excessive fuel consumption for supply and processing, wasteful packaging, food waste, and water contamination. 

But let’s stick to CO2 emissions. A survey conducted by Carbon Trust among 10,000 individuals in 8 European nations revealed that 66% of respondents favoured carbon labelling on products. However, it is unclear whether they are merely professing their support or genuinely acting on their intentions.

The Green Nudge:

The UK-based Mexican restaurant chain, Wahaca, decided to highlight the climate impact by including a carbon label next to each menu item. 

They partnered with Swedish startup Klimato, which calculates and communicates the climate impact of food, to develop a labelling system that uses CO2 equivalents as a base. The calculations include the emissions for growing all the ingredients, as well as those generated when transporting, storing and cooking them.

Wahaca is now using carbon labels in three different dimensions:

 

  • Low carbon (CO2e 0.6kg or lower): i.e. sweet potato burrito (0.46kg)
  • Medium carbon (CO2e 0.6kg – 1.6kg): a grilled chicken club quesadilla,
  • High carbon (CO2e 1.6kg or higher): such as a chargrilled steak burrito (3.04kg CO2e)


Although we lack concrete evidence in the Wahaca example, showing that highlighting the carbon impact affects food choice, multiple recent studies and trials have indicated that labelling can influence behaviour.

Psychology researchers from the University of Würzburg conducted a study which demonstrated that when individuals were presented with menus containing low-emission options, such as coconut curry with tofu instead of beef, the CO2e emissions decreased by almost one-third. Carbon labelling alone resulted in a 13.5% reduction in CO2e.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University arrived at similar conclusions. In a randomised clinical trial involving 5,049 adults in the United States, 23% more participants in the high-climate impact label group opted for a sustainable option (i.e., non-red meat), and 10% more participants in the low-climate impact label group chose a sustainable option compared to the control group.