Behavior change and pollution prevention

Word "Change" jigsaw puzzle pieces isolated on whiteWhat do employee engagement, management buy-in,  green consumerism, pollution prevention technical assistance, and supply chain sustainability have in common?

At the root, each depends on people modifying their behavior to create lasting change. Several years ago, GLRPPR established behavior change and sustainability as one of its primary focus areas. Some of the resources we’ve developed on this topic include:

Ultimately, successful implementation of pollution prevention projects requires people to change the way they do things. Getting people to make lasting change can be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Understanding the psychology of behavior change is a critical piece of the puzzle.

If you have a tip or resource related to behavior change, let us know in the comments.

 

New sector resource for Behavior Change & Sustainabilty

What do employee engagement, management buy-in,  green consumerism, pollution prevention technical assistance, and supply chain sustainability have in common?

At the root, each depends on people modifying their behavior to create lasting change. In recognition of this, GLRPPR made behavior change and sustainability one of its focus areas several years ago.  To support this focus area, we’ve developed a new sector resource on the topic, as well as added Behavior Change subcategories to several existing sectors.

The new sector resource has several different subcategories, including:

Please take some time to explore the new content and let us know if there’s something we missed.

Two upcoming webinars in the P2Rx Behavior Change Webinar Series

View archived webinars in the P2Rx Behavior Change Webinar Series.

Tools for Successfully Deploying and Measuring Behavior Change for the Littering Public
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 1:30-2:30 pm CDT
Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/378905274

Donna Walden will begin by presenting a step-by-step model on community based social marketing (CBSM) to help P2 programs properly selecting behaviors, establish a baseline, and develop strategies that can successfully measure behavior change.

Then UC Santa Barbara Masters candidates Jessica Midbust, Michael Mori, Paula Richter, and Bill Vosti will present a Master’s group thesis undertaken for the Algalita Marine Research Institute on reducing plastic debris in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel River Watersheds using some CBSM techniques.

Participants will learn some valuable behavior change techniques and hear recommendations made from the graduate students on how to change the behavior of the littering public.

Designing Employee Engagement Programs that Impact a Company’s Triple Bottom Line
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 1-2 pm CDT
Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/752485802

BAE Systems is a $14.4 billion multinational corporation that reduced its total utility costs by 48% over a three year period with a utility cost takeout (UCT) energy efficiency program.  This would not have been possible without first enrolling BAE’s 43,000 employees across the globe in its sustainability plan.

Morgan Rooney, Sustainability Communications Specialist for BAE Systems was responsible for initiating and running the employee engagement program to support BAE Sustainability goals.  Morgan will share her strategies and successes for getting employees to buy into a corporate sustainability mandate for the long haul and how this affected and continues to affect BAE’s triple bottom line.

Webinar attendees will learn education tactics, how to set up a task force or green team, employee challenges, and awards and recognition programs that work towards initiating and sustaining behavior change for large communities.

Sustainability Awareness Promoted by Major Music Festivals in the Great Lakes Region

[Post author: Lauren Murphy]

The days are getting longer, the weather is getting warmer, and music festival season is rapidly approaching. Every year, music festivals across the country attract hundreds of thousands of music enthusiasts. Many of these festivals are taking action to become more sustainable and encouraging their attendees to do so as well.

Summer Camp Music Festival – Chillicothe, IL – May 23-25, 2014

Summer Camp Music Festival has a team of volunteers that help collect and sort trash, as well as educate festival attendees about the recycling and composting programs that are offered. With color coded trash bins and portable recycling bags, Summer Camp makes it easy for fans to help keep the festival clean. Moreover, the festival requires that all vendors use compostable materials, greatly limiting the amount of trash that ends up in a landfill.

Every year, Summer Camp brings in numerous nonprofit organizations to promote sustainability, renewable energy, and carbon offsetting amongst the festival-goers. Attendees learn about many different ways that they can lower their impact on the environment, even after the festival is over.

Working with engineers at Caterpillar, Summer Camp has been able to use a higher concentration of biodiesel in their generators for all electricity needs, which significantly lowers their use of traditional energy sources. For the past three years, the festival tracked and offset their estimated CO2 emissions to reduced their environmental footprint.

To learn more about this eco-friendly festival’s sustainability initiatives, visit the Summer Camp Music Festival website.

Pitchfork Music Festival – Chicago, IL – July 18-20, 2014 

Through recycling programs, purchasing carbon offsets, and using sustainable power, Pitchfork Music Festival takes responsibility for their environmental impact, and acknowledges the importance of encouraging their fans to participate in the efforts to become a clean, green festival.

Recycling crews work with vendors to separate the trash generated at the festival, sending food waste to composting facilities and recycling as much as possible. Additionally, the festival has reduced oil demand and carbon emissions by powering the festival entirely with biodiesel and using hybrid vehicles for festival and musician transport. Pitchfork understands that being an international music festival creates the need for a lot of travel, which is why the festival has decided to buy carbon offsets to cover the transportation of all of their musicians. Purchasing these carbon offsets help fund projects to reduce CO2 emissions, so the festival strongly encourages attendees to purchase their own as well.

Visit the Pitchfork website for more information.

Lollapalooza – Chicago, IL – August 1-3, 2014

Lollapalooza is constantly seeking new, eco-friendly businesses to join the ‘Green Street Art Market’. Local businesses, as well as artisans from across the globe, are encouraged to promote their environmentally responsible goods to the thousands of fans that walk by throughout the weekend.

For the past few years, Lollapalooza has partnered with Camelbak to provide free, ice cold water to festival-goers at several filling stations throughout the park. This encourages the use of reusable water bottles and hydration packs and prevents up to 3.2 million disposable water bottles from becoming waste at the end of the 3-day festival. Lollapalooza also has hundreds of recycling bins located throughout the entire park, many of which are accompanied by a volunteer to inform people of what types of trash should be discarded into each container.

The festival implemented these programs not only to prevent the festival from causing harm to the environment and promote environmental awareness, but also to encourage volunteers from the Chicagoland area to be a part of the Environmental Initiatives programs. The application will become available mid-May, so check the volunteer information section of the FAQ page often throughout May because positions fill up quickly!

More information about the festival can be found on the Lollapalooza website.

Sustainability and behavior change article roundup

Here are some recent articles on behavior change and sustainability.

Tackle your company’s waste and create change from within — The Guardian

It’s hard to reduce anything by 90% – and waste to landfill is especially tricky. But that goal is what Los Angeles-based retail supplier, Farmer Brothers, has been working on for the last few years. The size of the reduction is ambitious. Even more remarkable, though, is that this initiative did not originate in the company’s sustainability department, the facilities crew, or even the CEO. Instead the leader was an inspired product manager named Sarah Beaubien.

myActions Platform Turning Engagement with Waste, Wildlife Initiatives Into Action — Sustainable Brands

Engaging people in sustainability remains one of the cause’s biggest challenges – ensuring their behavior reflects their engagement is another. A number of studies have been devoted to bridging the gap between people’s attitudes and their actions, and it remains a conundrum for many organizations on a mission to promote positive behavior. Luckily, tools such as myActions are helping companies not only engage certain groups on the merit of more conscious behaviors but motivate them to follow through. myActions builds and designs online communities and social tools that track the digital sharing of real-world actions. For every action taken, a donation is made to the cause of the user’s choice. The company partners with organizations from municipalities (Ohio Valley) to nonprofits (Net Impact) to brands (EKOCYCLE) that provide the greatest opportunity for impact through their networks.

Consumers may change behavior if delivered the right message — GreenBiz

If you’ve heard me speak at a conference, you know there’s a point in the presentation where I typically say, “Don’t try to educate your audience into changing their behaviors.” Then I ask the audience to raise their hands if they can think of at least one thing they know they should do on a daily basis to be healthier but that they don’t do. Nearly every hand goes up, and I say, “See, knowing a thing doesn’t mean you’re going to do a thing.”

But I might be wrong.

Seventh National ACEEE Conference on Energy Efficiency as a Resource: Report to U.S. Department of Energy

This report summarizes the content and themes of the ACEEE Seventh National Conference on Energy Efficiency as a Resource, held in Nashville, Tennessee from September 22 to 24, 2013, per the agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy.  The successful conference demonstrated the progress of energy efficiency as a resource in the Southeast and leading regions of the country.  Speakers and sessions examined progress and energy savings achievements, and how programs in the field are evolving past previous limits towards greater savings and participation. Challenges and policy issues arising after a decade of growth were addressed in-depth.

See also the presentations available on the conference web site.

New Harvard Business School Working Paper on incentivizing behavior change to reduce carbon emissions

In a working paper from Harvard Business School entitled “Pay for Environmental Performance: The Effect of Incentive Provision on Carbon Emissions”, researchers Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, Shelley Xin Li, and George Serafeim analyzed the incentive structures of climate change management for a sample of large, predominantly multinational organizations, then characterized and assessed the effectiveness of different types of incentive schemes that corporations have adopted to encourage employees to reduce carbon emissions. Some of their key findings include:

  • Monetary incentives are associated with higher carbon emissions.
  • Non-monetary incentives are associated with lower carbon emissions.
  • When employees perceive their action as socially positive, the adoption of non-monetary incentives might be more effective than monetary incentives in reducing carbon emissions.
  • For tasks involving socially positive behavior, monetary incentives are not effective and actually detrimental unless they are provided to people for whom such tasks constitute part of their formal job responsibility.

Webinar: Environmental Sustainability and Behavioral Science: Meta-Analysis of Pro-environmental Behavior Experiments

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Tuesday, May 7, 1-2 pm CDT
Register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6597474733924842752

There have been over 100 published psychological experiments that have attempted to get people to do the right thing for the environment. These experiments have covered many different kinds of behaviors (recycling, energy conservation, etc.) and have used many different ways of motivating people (incentives, information, feedback, etc.) What is the big picture that comes from all of this research? In this webinar, Dr. Richard Osbaldiston will discuss his recent meta-analysis of these studies, and he will share what we know—and what we don’t know—about promoting pro-environmental behaviors.

About the speaker: Richard Osbaldiston has been studying environmental issues for over 15 years as both an engineer and a psychologist. He is equally comfortable talking about kilowatt hours or intrinsic motivation. And in fact, it is the marriage of these disciplines that gives the greatest insight into we what need to do to change behavior and protect our environment.

This event is part of the P2Rx Social Media and Behavior Change webinar series.

GLRPPR behavior change webinar archive and slides

In case you missed yesterday’s GLRPPR webinar “Beyond Energy Efficiency: Behavior Change Tactics for the Pollution Prevention Community”, the archive is available at https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/833280647 and the presentation slides are available at http://www.glrppr.org/docs/Behavior-change-webinar-slides.pdf.

If you did attend yesterday’s webinar (or if you watch the archive in the next week or so), please take a moment to fill out the evaluation at https://illinois.edu/sb/sec/4695636.

This webinar is part of the Behavior Change and Social Media webinar series sponsored by the Pollution Prevention Resource Exchange. Register for other webinars in the series at http://www.p2rx.org/new_home/webinars.cfm.

Webinar: Beyond Energy Efficiency: Behavior Change Tactics for the Pollution Prevention Community

Thursday, January 17, 2013, 2-3 pm
Register at https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/833280647

Join Susan Mazur-Stommen, Director of Behavior and Human Dimensions Program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), to discuss what behavior change research tells us about how people make decisions and what motivates them to make changes. She will also examine how pollution prevention technical assistance providers can use that research to influence behavior change and improve implementation rates at the companies they work with.

The webinar is hosted by the Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable (GLRPPR) and  is part of the Pollution Prevention Resource Exchange’s Behavior Change and Social Media webinar series.