Fostering Sustainable Behavior

Many people have bought cotton shopping bags to use in place of the plastic bags provided by stores. While we expect that the people who have bought these bags prefer to use them whenever they shop, I also expect that like myself, they frequently leave them behind in the house or car. The problem is not a lack of motivation to use the bags, but rather simply forgetting to bring them.

Numerous actions that promote sustainability are susceptible to the most human of traits: forgetting. Turning off computer equipment, turning down the thermostat in the evening, checking the air pressure in our tires and selecting products that have recycled content while shopping are just a few of the many actions that we are apt to forget to do. In some cases, innovations such as a programmable thermostat can free us from the burden of continually remembering to carry out an activity. Most repetitive actions, however, have no simple technological fix.

Fortunately, prompts are effective in reminding people to engage in sustainable behaviors. A prompt is a visual or auditory aid which reminds us to carry out an activity that we might otherwise forget. The purpose of a prompt is not to change attitudes or increase motivation, but simply to remind us to engage in an action that we are already predisposed to do.

Prompts and Sustainable Behavior

Prompts abound. Slogans, such as Think Globally, Act Locally, are, as Gardner and Stern suggest, designed to promote sustainable behaviors.1 Despite a prevalent belief that prompts such as this are effective in promoting sustainable behavior, non-explicit prompts ordinarily have little or no impact. Prompts that target specific behaviors can, however, have a substantial impact. Here are several examples:

• In a water efficiency project in Perth, Australia the application of prompts to various household devices, such as taps, reduced water use by 23%.2 Simply providing households with an informational pamphlet encouraging reductions in water use had no impact, however. This study underscored the importance of presenting a prompt in close proximity to the behavior to be encouraged.
• In a project in the Netherlands, providing a prompt over a waste receptacle that activated either personal or social norms regarding littering, resulted in a 50% reduction in litter.3
• In a study with significant implications, the presence of lids which indicated which recyclables should go in which recycling containers increased beverage recycling by 34% and significantly reduced contamination.4
• Jeffrey Smith and Russell Bennett have shown that prompts can be very effective in discouraging people from walking across lawns.5 At four separate locations, 79% of pedestrians were found to cut across a lawn rather than taking a slightly longer pathway. However, when a sign with the message, Do not cut across the grass, was placed at these four sites, lawn-walking decreased by 46%. Lawn-walking was reduced even further when a second sign was added that said Cutting across the grass will save 10 seconds. Indeed, when these two signs were present, lawn-walking was reduced to only 8%.
• Prompts by themselves have not been found to be effective in encouraging pet owners to pick up after their dogs. However, when signs were combined with modeling of the desired behavior, 80% of dog owners picked up after their pet.6
• Litter receptacles serve as a visual prompt for the proper disposal of garbage. Simply making a litter receptacle more visually interesting was found to double the amount of litter deposited in one study and increase it by 61% in another.7,8
• Retrofitting older buildings is the most effective way to reduce their energy use, but for many organizations the cost of a retrofit is prohibitive.9 Simple lifestyle changes can, however, have a significant impact upon energy use, often with no capital expense. One such example involved encouraging university faculty to drop and tilt their blinds when they left their offices at the end of the day to reduce night-time heat loss during the winter. Baseline data was collected by cleaning staff who recorded whether blinds were dropped and tilted correctly (concave surface of the blind tilted into the room to deflect heat back into the room). Faculty were encouraged to drop-and-tilt their blinds through a general written request from the university president and by having the cleaning staff leave a reminder on the desk of faculty who forgot to drop-and-tilt their blinds. These two simple methods increased the percentage of faculty who adjusted their blinds from less than 10% to roughly two-thirds.
• Compared to baseline, the introduction of more conveniently located recycling containers and the use of prompts increased the amount of newspaper recycled in three apartment complexes from 50% to 100%.10
• Following the introduction of verbal and visual prompts in a high school cafateria, littering was reduced by over 350%.11
• Prompts have also been shown to have a substantial impact upon paper recycling.12 In one department at Florida State University, a prompt that read Recyclable Materials was placed directly above a recycling container. The prompt indicated the types of paper to be recycled, while another prompt over the trash receptacle read No Paper Products. The addition of these two simple prompts increased the percentage of fine paper captured by 54%, while in another department the same procedure increased the capture rate by 29%.

These and other studies support the notion that to be effective, a prompt should be delivered as close in space and time as possible to the target behavior. Accordingly, place prompts to turn off lights on or beside the light switch by the exit. Similarly, prompts to purchase products that contain recycled content should be on the store shelf directly in front of the product.

Prompts and Source Reduction

Several initiatives to encourage source reduction are demonstrating just how effective prompts can be in promoting sustainable behavior.

The Minnesota Office of Waste Management has designed a program entitled SMART (Saving Money And Reducing Trash) that provides communities with various educational materials for shoppers. One element of this program is the shelf talker. Shelf talkers are prompts that identify products that reduce waste and save money. Similarly, the Central States Education Center in Champaign, Illinois uses posters, flyers and shelf labels to indicate products that are environmentally friendly.13 This program identifies items that either are recyclable locally, have less packaging, or are safer-earth products (e.g., non-toxic cleaners). Affixing 700 long-term labels throughout a store takes several hours, considerably less time than it takes to adjust the 17,000 price labels that, on average, are changed weekly. Analysis of supermarket store inventory suggests that the use of these prompts has shifted purchases to recyclable containers. The impact upon the purchase of least-waste packages and safer earth products has not yet been determined.14

In Seattle, Washington, a Get in the Loop, Buy Recycled campaign has been operating for several years.15 Like the other initiatives, this program utilized shelf talkers that identify products with recycled content. The program was advertised through television, radio and newspaper advertisements by both the King County Commission for Marketing Recyclable Materials and participating retailers. In the year that it was initially launched, 850 retailers in western Washington state participated. Relative to the month preceding the initial launch of the campaign, sales of recycled-content products increased nearly 30%.16 Sales of specific product categories have shown even more dramatic increases. For example, sales of recycled-content paper products have increased by 74%.

Building Prompts into Your Program

Prompts can be effective for encouraging both one-time and repetitive behaviors that promote sustainability. One-time behaviors, as the name suggests, refer to actions that individuals engage in only once, but that result in an ongoing positive environmental impact (e.g., installing a clock thermostat, connecting a low-flow shower head). Because these behaviors only have to be engaged in once, they are often easier to influence than repetitive behaviors, where an individual has to engage in an action repeatedly for there to be a significant environmental benefit (e.g., composting, source reduction). Given the difficulty of making lifestyle changes that promote sustainability, prompts may be of particular use in establishing and maintaining repetitive behaviors that favor sustainability.

Case Study (Hide)

Reducing Outdoor Water Use

In an intriguing test of the efficacy of community-based social marketing relative to traditional information-intensive methods, three Canadian regions each delivered outdoor water efficiency programs to 500 homes in their region.17 These homes were similar in property size, demographics and age of the home. Measurement of reductions in water use in all three regions were based upon a meter that was installed on the water mains that serviced the three groups of homes.

© Region of Durham

The region that used the traditional information-intensive approach delivered a water efficiency brochure and rain gauge to their 500 residents. Later, they provided these same residents with a reminder tag that could be placed over their outdoor water faucet. This program resulted in a 1% reduction in water use and cost $22 Canadian per household to deliver.

The two other regions used a community-based social marketing approach which involved students, in one region, and staff in the other, going door-to-door and speaking to residents about the importance of reducing outdoor water use. In each case, households were asked to make a commitment to reducing outdoor water use by placing a sticker in the front window of their home. These stickers acknowledged that the household was working to reduce outdoor water use. They were also asked if a prompt could be placed over their outdoor water faucet. One version of this prompt is pictured on the previous page. The prompt was made of plastic to withstand water damage and reminded residents to consider whether it was an odd or even day (lawn watering in these regions was to occur on odd or even days based on house number and calendar date), whether it had rained in the last week, and finally, that lawns need only a small amount of water per week to remain healthy.

The visits by students cost on average $44 Canadian per household and resulted in a 32% reduction in outdoor water use. The visits by staff, in contrast, cost $18 per household and resulted in a 45% reduction in outdoor water use (staff salaries were not included in these per capita costs). It is unclear whether the difference in water reductions between these two regions is due to a potential perceived difference in the credibility of who was delivering the message (students versus staff), differences between the regions, or both. It is also worth noting that despite the success of the two community-based social marketing programs in reducing outdoor water use, both used a relatively weak form of commitment. The commitment window stickers were only viewable by someone standing on the front doorstep. A more public display of commitment could have involved placing stickers on the side of recycling containers where the household s commitment would have been more easily viewed. As noted in the chapter on commitment, the use of recycling container commitments is also likely to foster social norms and social diffusion in a neighborhood.

© Region of Durham

The return on investment of these three programs was also calculated. The information-intensive approach brought about such small changes in outdoor water use that it was found to be not cost-effective. In contrast, even though the two community-based social marketing approaches cost more to deliver, they both brought about such significant reductions in water use that both were found to be cost-effective to deliver on a larger scale.

A Checklist for Using Prompts

In considering using prompts, follow these guidelines.

• Make the prompt noticeable.
• The prompt should be self-explanatory. Through graphics and/or text the prompt should explain simply what the person is to do (e.g., turn off the lights).
• The prompt should be presented as close in time and space as possible to the targeted behavior (e.g., place a prompt to turn off lights directly on a light switch; place a prompt to purchase a product with recycled content directly below the product).
• Use prompts to encourage people to engage in positive behaviors rather than to avoid environmentally harmful actions.

Below are several examples of how prompts can be used to foster sustainable behavior.

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