The fight for CDL in Australia

Monetary incentives can be a very effective way to incite behaviour change. The success of container deposit legislation (CDL) in reducing littering behaviour and increase recycling rates is a great example of this.

A container deposit scheme involves collecting a monetary deposit on drink containers at point of sale. When the container is returned to a redemption centre or the seller, so is the deposit. Container deposit legislation (CDL) exists in many countries in Europe (and elsewhere) and has existed in the state of South Australia since 1977. There are many benefits to having of a container deposit scheme, including reducing  littering and waste that ends up in landfill or polluting the ground or ocean, increasing recycling rates which reduces need for virgin materials, and helping the homeless find a way to get some extra money by “hunting” for and returning discarded containers. According to EPA South Australia, 98% of South Australians are support the CDL state-wide and nationally, believing it to be an effective way to reduce rubbish and increase recycling. CDL was introduced in the Northern Territory in 2012, but was repealed when CocaCola and Schweppes sued the state. NSW is facing a similar problem.

Over the last few months, citizens of Sydney (and all over the state) have been raising quite a fuss about getting a 10-cent container deposit scheme implemented in NSW. A 10-cent refund is supported by over 80% of the community (Clean Up Australia) and is one of the most effective ways to address beverage container waste and littering. However, big guns like Coca-Cola and Schweppes have been fighting against them, arguing that CDL isn’t the best or only way to reduce waste. Seriously? We’ve been trying other methods and they aren’t really working, so what’s the problem? The brands are big enough and so well-known that something like a container deposit surely can’t hurt their image too much. In fact, it might help it.

Martin Place demonstration

The Boomerang Alliance, made up of 27 Australian environmental groups campaigning for recycling (including Take 3 and Responsible Runners), has been adamantly supporting implementation of CDL. A few weeks ago, they held a demonstration in Martin Place that involved dumping massive amounts of bottles and cans all over the square in order to show people how much we waste in Australia. The fact that South Australia’s recycling rate is around 85%, whereas NSW is around 50%, is a pretty good indicator that CDL is, in fact, effective. Similar campaigns are underway all around Australia, so hopefully progress will be made soon.

SmartSwitch: “resisting” unnecessary energy usage

Back when I was at Stanford in 2009, a few of my fellow product designers from the Joint Program in Design – Peter Russo and Brendan Wypich – designed a light switch that makes you think twice about your power consumption.

Their concept, SmartSwitch, is a sliding light switch that provides tactile feedback about how much energy you are using throughout your home. The switch links into your electricity grid and assesses your ongoing energy usage. When it reads that your  consumption is too high (by what standards, I’m not quite sure), the switch increases in resistance and becomes hard to slide. The idea is that is makes you stop and reconsider how many lights, appliances, etc. are running in your household, and whether or not it’s necessary for them all to be on.

I really like this concept, but I question if it would be effective in changing behaviour in the long term. It’s possible that once the novelty of the switch wears off, people will stop noticing it and return to their normal habits. Or perhaps it’s impossible to ignore the varying resistance and it starts to be annoying. Still, there is a kernel of really good idea there that can be expanded upon to help encourage more environmentally conscious human behaviour.

 

Read more about SmartSwitch: Wired, Engadget

Nest: The Learning Thermostat

One challenge for energy-efficient buildings is getting building occupants to actually use the building efficiently. Leaving windows open while turning up heat, leaving lights on, etc. are a few examples of how users can decrease building performance through simple actions. This usually results from a simple lack of understanding of how the building operates and how to interact with it. Part of a solution that will help address this problem is an intuitive interface with the building to help users (i) monitor and manage performance, and (ii) understand how their actions affect performance. Nest takes a pretty good stab at helping address this issue for residential homes.

Nest: The Learning Thermostat (photo from http://www.nest.com)

Nest is a user-friendly thermostat that empowers people to take more informed, accurate control of the heating and cooling of their homes (and, consequently, their energy usage). The main reasons I find Nest to be a great example of good design are:

(1) Nest’s sleek and simple interface makes  it significantly easier to understand and use than your typical, button-laden thermostat. It’s design is also very easy on the eye, if not beautiful, so you no longer need to paint your thermostat the colour of the wall it’s mounted on in the hope of camouflaging it.

(2) Nest is self-programming! It incorporates technology that allows to learn your habits and program itself based on how you use it in the first few days of use. If you always leave for work at 8am and turn off the thermostat when you leave, then it will learn this action and do it for you so you’ll no longer have to remember.

(3) It gives a graphic “nudge” to help users be more efficient by displaying a small leaf when you are optimising energy efficiency settings.

(4) It utilises the power of the smartphone as a remote control to allow users to monitor and control the thermostat when they aren’t home. This not only gives users a new avenue for interacting with their home, it also (in a way) makes it fun.

(5) Nest tracks your usage patterns and reports them back to you via another user-friendly, online interface. This helps you can better understand how temperatures relate to energy usage, and how that relates to your energy bill. With this information, it’s much easier to improve future performance and save energy.

I’d love to see something like this developed at a larger scale to address more complex performance monitoring and management in commercial buildings. If you know of any that exist, please mention them in a comment below!

Littering aaand…

The psychology of littering both fascinates and disturbs me, so this is likely the first of many posts about peoples’ behavior regarding waste. The photo on the left shows two of the many clearly-marked rubbish and recycling bins situated around Bondi Beach. Despite the presence of these bins, there are still heaps of bottles, cigarette butts, napkins, and other rubbish that wind up scattered all over the beach…and eventually wind up in the ocean. I volunteer to help clean up Bondi with Responsible Runners each Sunday and we are always shocked by how much we can collect in just 30 minutes.

So…What makes people litter? There are many factors that influence littering behavior: culture, education, law/policy, social & situational context, the designed environment, etc. These factors vary significantly from country to country, so I’ll focus on Australia for this post. According to the world’s largest study of littering behavior, “Understanding Littering Behaviour in Australia” prepared by Community Change Consultants for the Beverage Industry Environment Council, the main reasons people litter are:

• lazy or could not be bothered (35%)
• no bin being nearby (19%)
• habit and forgetfulness (14%)
• the inconvenience of continuing to hold on to the waste material (14%)
• there was no ashtray available (10%)

Overall, peoples’ attitude toward littering is negative and they feel guilty for doing it. However, the litterers clearly don’t feel guilty enough to bother to find a bin, and 25% of them think that litter is mainly the local council’s responsibility. Also, most litter was observed to occur within 5 meters from a bin, so there goes the excuse of not having a bin nearby. So, what can you do? These are just a few of the many intriguing insights that the Community Change Consultants uncovered during their extensive studies. You can download the report and other Littering Behaviour Studies at the Australia Food & Grocery Council website. It’s definitely worth a browse.

A key take-away here is that the ins and outs of littering behavior are very complex. It’s not clear how (if it’s even possible) to design a fool-proof environment to completely prevent littering, although a variety tactics have been tried: anti-littering signage, clearly-marked rubbish and recycling bins of various designs, stricter littering policies, etc. From the study, it seems like implementing a greater variety of these tactics in one area has the best result, but the overall impact on littering is still not very significant. Still, just throwing out every tactic we can think of isn’t a good solution either. Rather, each environment needs to be designed with intent, based on user observation and testing, because it isn’t until we observe our products in use that we uncover the unexpected consequences of our design choices. (This is why designers always follow an iterative design process!) Here is an example of one of the study’s surprising observations:

“On one occasion a mobile garbage bin lid was closed by one person to rest a drink on top and within the next twenty minutes not only was the bin lid covered with disposable objects but people then deposited their waste around the bin, on the ground. The most interesting aspect of this observation was that the bin remained empty while waste piled up on top of its lid, although other bins were within 6 metres of the one with the closed lid.” (Understanding Littering Behaviour in Australia, p58)

Clearly, bin design affects behavior. You can change the size of bin opening, the presence of lid or ashtray, etc. but until you watch people using it, you won’t really know how your design is going to work in every situation.

It’s going to be a long, iterative process of designing environment, education, product, and policy to really reduce littering. If you don’t want to wait that long, then do what I do – pick it up and toss it properly yourself!

Method’s methods

One of the first examples of good green product design that I came across as a PD student was Method cleaning products. Method’s founders, Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan, saw a need not only for safe, green, toxin-free cleaning products, but also a need for ones that weren’t so ugly they had to hide them under the sink. The result: iconic recyclable bottles filled with so-safe-you-could-drink-it cleaning solutions that many people now proudly use in their homes.

Triple bottom line sustainability is a key driver for Method products, business, social engagement, thought leadership, etc., and the company aims to be very transparent about all of it. You can read about Method’s “greenskeeping” here. One of their accomplishments that jumps out at me is that they created bottles (the world’s first, in fact!) using recycled plastic collected from the ocean. How cool is that?

Now, I’ve seen a lot of “green” product design companies out there. What makes Method stand out from the rest is the way in which it designs it’s products not only to be greener, but to be better. Consumers often think that buying something because it’s “green” means they will have to compromise on other factors like functionality, aesthetics, usability. What the Method guys did so well is that they made a better product that people want to buy regardless of the fact that it’s also environmentally-friendly.

Imagine you are walking down the cleaning solution aisles of Target, with rows upon rows of similar-looking bottles around you. How do you know what to buy? Usually, you’d probably go for something familiar, cheap, or something that smells good. But then you come across the Method line, which clearly stands out because the bottles are visually stunning in form and color. Looking closely, you see they have some very nice fragrances, too. This “cool factor” alone can be enough to make you choose that product over the others…and you haven’t even yet discovered that it’s also healthy and green! Double win! The only issue here for many people is Method’s higher price point. While the price isn’t particularly outrageous, there is a significant market sector that cannot afford such “luxury” cleaning products. Perhaps Methods can play up the health benefits of using non-toxic cleaners, but until that becomes more important than price, or Method can (and wants to) sell it’s products for less, the company will miss out on this market sector.

To conclude, I believe it’s this kind of holistic, human-centered design strategy that will make green products more successful in the market; a design strategy where “green” doesn’t mean compromise, but is rather an additional benefit to an overall better product. Getting consumers to start choosing more truly sustainable products over others can be a good first step towards getting them to make other environmentally-conscious behavior changes.