Fostering Sustainable Behavior

The previous six chapters identified a variety of tools to overcome barriers to a sustainable behavior that reside within an individual. As powerful as these tools are, they will be ineffective if the behavior is inconvenient. If the behavior is unpleasant or time-consuming, for example, no matter how well you address internal barriers your community-based social marketing strategy will be unsuccessful.

The first step to removing external barriers is to identify them. Using the techniques outlined in the chapter on barriers and benefits, attempt to isolate what external barriers exist and what can be done to address them. The City of Boulder, Colorado, for example, identified that two significant barriers to mass transit usage were workers concerns regarding how they would get home quickly in an emergency (e.g., a sick child that has to come home from school) and, for women, safety concerns about taking mass transit late at night. These two barriers were addressed by providing a free taxi service in either of these instances.

The role of inconvenience is also evident with backyard composting. At present, approximately 30% of homeowners in the Province of Ontario participate in composting, compared with over 80% participation in curbside recycling. While many factors might explain these substantially different participation rates, it is likely that the inconvenience of obtaining a composter, and the perceived inconvenience of composting, are significant barriers. Indeed, in two studies that I conducted in different Canadian cities, inconvenience was on both occasions one of the most significant barriers to composting.1 Furthermore, in comparing households who compost seasonally with those who compost throughout the year, the only factor which was found to distinguish these two groups was the perceived inconvenience of composting in the winter (remember the anecdote with which I began this book).

Communities that provide curbside organic collection effectively eliminate several of the external barriers that exist for backyard composting. First, these communities directly provide households with containers or carts, removing the cost and inconvenience of obtaining a backyard composter from a store. Second, many of these communities provide kitchen organic catchers along with the curbside container, increasing the convenience of collecting organics. Because many of these containers often include a prompt to identify what can be composted, learning to separate organics is also simplified. Third, unlike backyard composting, the process of curbside organic collection is nearly identical to that used for curbside recycling and garbage disposal (place in a container, take the container to the curb, periodically wash container). The similarity of this new behavior (curbside organic collection) to older, well established behaviors (recycling and garbage collection), simplifies what a household needs to learn in order to participate. The impact of making composting convenient and inexpensive by providing containers and curbside collection can produce dramatic results. In an evaluation of a curbside organic pilot, in the Halifax Regional Municipality, fully 99% of households participated. Indeed, the one household who was not participating, wanted to, but had not received a cart in which to place their organics.

Case Study (Hide)

Making Biking Convenient

Bike-sharing programs were first launched in Amsterdam in 1965. This first foray into communal bike-sharing did not fare well, as the bikes were quickly stolen or vandalized. Thirty-five years later, however, bike-sharing programs are being implemented in cities around the world. The current generation of bikes are both durable and traceable, significantly reducing the problems that plagued early bike-sharing initiatives. As of 2009, 100 bike-sharing programs were in existence, with another 45 being introduced in 2010 alone.5 In total, some 139,000 bikes are being shared in different programs across the globe, with some sites, such as Velib in Paris, averaging an astounding 75,000 rentals a day.6

The concept is disarmingly simple. Bikes are provided at convenient stations, such as the one shown below. Users register at a station or online to use the bikes. Registrations can be for as short as a day or as long as a year. Once registered, riders either enter a code or swipe a registration card to obtain a bike, which they then drop off at another station close to their destination. Bikes that are not returned within 24 hours are considered stolen and are charged to the user s credit card.

© Bixi Montreal

Bike-sharing programs have several target audiences, perhaps the most important of which is commuters. Even the most extensive mass-transit systems can only get commuters close to their destination. Bike sharing allows commuters to travel the last mile quickly and conveniently. Additional target audiences include commuters who have driven to work, but then use the bikes for short trips. Finally, tourists are frequent users, particularly in cities such as Paris.

Most bike-sharing programs are franchises in which a company runs the program for a municipality in return for being able to sell advertising that is placed at the stations or on the bikes themselves.7

The Bixi system in Montreal, which is pictured here, is intriguing. Stations are solar-powered and can be set up in just twenty minutes. Furthermore, these stations are mobile and can be moved to different locations as demand requires, providing a level of flexibility that few other transportation programs can match.

While the impact of bike-sharing programs on emissions can be difficult to ascertain, as it is uncertain that trips taken by bike are displacing vehicle trips, the distance travelled by bike is extraordinary. In Paris alone, users of the Velib system travel over 300,000 kilometers per day. Survey research suggests that bike-sharing is displacing between 8% and 16% of vehicle trips.8,9

It is important to assess whether it is realistic to overcome the external barriers you identify. To do this, it is useful to explore the success that other programs have had in promoting the same behavior and decide whether you have the resources to mount a similar program. Promoting the use of car pooling, mass transit, bicycling and walking as alternatives to single occupant car usage, as Boulder, Colorado has done, requires significant expenditures. In cases where the financial resources do not exist to make the new behavior more convenient, such as through building bicycle paths, consider instead making the behavior you wish to discourage less convenient and more costly. Multiple possibilities exist for making an activity such as single-occupant driving less convenient and more costly.2,3 As described in the last chapter, many communities have instituted slower laneways on highways for single-occupant cars or have introduced traffic calming by turning two-way streets into one-way streets. Corporations have discouraged single-occupant car usage by charging more for parking for single-occupant vehicles and making the parking of these cars less convenient (e.g., farther from the building).

Making the activity you wish to discourage less convenient and more expensive can increase motivation for the behavior you wish to encourage. In short, you want to design a program that enhances motivation by making the sustainable behavior more convenient and less costly than the alternative, non-sustainable activity. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, incentives can be effectively used to enhance motivation.

Finally, it is important to note that convenience is to some extent a matter of perception. When people have experience with an activity, they often come to see that activity as being more convenient than when they first began. In one study, as individuals gained more experience with recycling bottles they found it more convenient.4 While a behavior that is perceived very inconvenient will need other measures, those actions that are perceived to be only somewhat inconvenient may be addressed through the use of tools such as commitment and norms.

In summary, because the nature of external barriers can vary dramatically across communities, strategies for removing these barriers will have to be tailored to each situation. Begin by identifying what external barriers exist and then seek information from other communities on how they have dealt with the external barriers you have identified. Next, determine whether you have the resources to implement similar initiatives. If you determine that you do not have the resources, you should seriously reconsider your options. As mentioned above, a community-based social marketing initiative that ignores external barriers is a recipe for failure.

Below are some external barriers to sustainable behaviors and some possible solutions.

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