Cooks River Litter Prevention Strategy

Educating and motivating the community to stop littering and drive long term change for the Cooks River.

C L I E N T

The River Canoe Club of NSW & Civille.

T E A M

Nobuto Nishizawa, Vanessa Bu, Ivy Liang.

M E T H O D

Business analysis, competitive analysis, secondary research, surveys, affinity mapping and data synthesis, sketching and strategic planning.

D U R A T I O N

3-week sprint (Jan 2022 - Feb 2022).

M Y R O L E

UX Designer.

T O O L S

Pen & paper, Figma, Miro, Notion.

The Brief

In 2006, the Cooks River was reported as the most polluted waterway in Australia.

River Canoe Club has been working hard to clean the river and has been granted funding in recent years. They have put together a littler prevention strategy to stop litter from getting into the river in the first place.

They wanted help in understanding where to start, get the community involved and create a long-lasting change.

What we found

Firstly we wanted to understand the problem space. We looked into the global litter issue and how some organisations are dealing with it around the world.

We looked at 17 campaigns worldwide and found that:

8

motivated people through

community pride

4

motivated people through

emotional messaging

3

aimed to drive results by making it

easy to do

2

aimed at enforcing change through

social pressure

From the 40 survey responses we received, we found that:

37/40

participants

through their neighbourhood had some or low litter

27/40

participants

were unsure if their community was doing anything about litter

20/40

participants

weren’t doing anything about litter and the other half did very little

Concerns

  1. Environmental damages

  2. Wildlife well-being

  3. Hygiene and cleanliness

Framework for change

Our research suggested that we cannot change the community to prevent litter without getting people to care about it first and this is no simple task.

For someone to care, they have to understand the issue and why it is important to them, only then people will think about changing something in their lives.

We broke this down into 3 key components, awareness, motivation and trigger. These are the components that drive and encourage long term change.

What motivates us?

There are numerous studies done on human behaviour and motivation. We identified four key areas that related directly to litter prevention.

Emotion

Studies have shown people decide with their hearts and more often than logic.

Experience

Personal experience serves as a basis for reflection, which may develop opinions to take action.

Closeness

Naturally people feel more concerned by issues that feel close to home.

Benefit

We are all motivated by things that benefit us personally like property prices.

Awareness

We also identified that raising awareness is one of the most important factors in litter prevention. More people who know the real damages of our litter means more people who may actively get involved in solving the issue.

We looked at some ways in which our client might educate the community. We identified social media and websites to be the first two areas to target.

Social media

Facebook still holds the highest usage in Australia, followed by Youtube then Instagram.

We did uncover an interesting statistic that showed LinkedIn to have a higher number of users amongst the 25-34 age bracket, this would be a great place to target professionals and businesses.

We came up with some examples of social media post which uses pride, emotional engagement and local closeness. Research shows all of these traits have known to work in motivating people to act.

Website structure

We explored ideas on what the litter prevention website might entail. This information architecture lays out some basic functions it may have.

We also made some basic recommendations for their current website to include information about the current state of the river and the impact of litter, the presentation strategy in-depth and how people are able to join and help.

Driving long term change

We recognised early on that driving long term change is the most challenging but very important part of litter prevention.

For this reason, we looked into the behaviour change model developed by Dr BJ Fogg, founder of Behaviour Lab at Stanford University.

What we discovered is that according to his model, there were two parts that were missing in order to promote litter prevention in individuals, motivation and prompt (trigger).

We also looked at other human behaviour models which might influence people to do the right thing.

Social proof

“If everyone else is doing it, it must be the right things to do.”

We need to promote and recognise good work that is happening and get the word out to the general public.

Scarcity bias

“Diamonds are expensive because of it’s limited supply.”

Campaign messaging could be around how precious our river is and how we need to save.

Mere exposure effect

“I’ll go with this brand because I’ve seen it before.”

We need to keep up the social media presence and new posts to try to reach the community continuously.

Temporal discounting

“I’ll eat this muffin now and gym later for my six pack.”

Showing people that river health is a problem we are facing now, may increase people to see we have to act now, not later.

Community is made of individuals

We recognised that to create a community change, we needed to focus on the individuals who make up that community.

If these changes are to be made without new laws and regulations, we must depend on the individuals to do the right thing.

Proactive initiatives

These are initiatives like reducing packaging and making sure your bins aren’t overflowing which all of us can do with little effort.

If we can remind people to reduce packaging or buy things that have less packaging and remind people at the point of purchase, this could have a great community impact.

Litter prevention strategy identified that a lot of littering is happening due to overflowing bins. If we’re able to target people to get their bins emptied every week and remind them, it would reduce the chance of litter coming from overflowing bins.

Reactive initiatives

Although proactive initiatives are important, it’s equally important to tackle the current issues we are seeing.

Some initiatives we came up with are:

Additionally, crowd sourcing ideas might be a great way to get the community involved and get the conversation started.

What makes campaigns successful?

We wanted to find out what makes these campaigns successful. From the 25+ campaigns we looked at, we recognised they all used very different tactics and they all worked because each city is different.

Yokohama, Japan

Place-based education

Yokohama in Japan achieved a 43% reduction in garbage waste with place-based education.

Singapore

Strict urban laws and heavy fines

Singapore achieved a clean city by strict urban laws and heavy fines. Although this isn’t a path we encourage.

La Villette, Paris

Waterways into swimming hotspots

Cities around the world are making polluted waterways into swimming hotspots to reconnect people with rivers and canals.

So what is the right initiative for the Cooks River?

To answer this question, we realised there was only one way, to try them. Our communities are vastly complex, we cannot take another campaign from a different city and expect it to work in ours.

For this reason, we decided to recommend using Scrum to test our initiatives in the Cooks River catchment area.

Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together. Today widely used in software development and quickly expanding into other fields, Scrum allows teams to learn through experience by breaking down a large project into small sections. We can use this exact framework to test and measure the success of initiatives before deploying them to the wider community.

Create a list

  • Sorting out single use plastics

  • Simple local litter reporting

  • Love your home ground

  • Love your school ground

  • Love your verge

  • Take away and clean up

  • Local litter campaign resources

  • Storm drain signs

  • Storm drain strainers

  • Storm drain infographic campaign

  • Plogging campaign

  • Cleaning up commercial lanes

  • “Treasure” hunt campaign

  • Creative competition campaign

  • Community workshops

  • Supermarket signage

  • Pride messaging campaign

  • Social media blast

Prioritise the list

Plot out all the initiatives onto a quadrant chart with 2 different metrics.

For this project, we felt social media campaigns would be the most cost effect and high reaching method.

Plan a sprint

River Canoe Club had a map showing high litter areas.

We recommended they target these areas first with initiatives, but only deploy one initiative at a time to measure success.

Run the sprint

Once the plan is complete, they simply need to run that campaign with suppliers who will be able to help them with the campaign.

Measure success

Measuring the success of the campaign is the most important part.

Once they have some data, their priorities may change and bring them closer to success.

Summary

Litter prevention is not a linear process, we must take a holistic approach. Getting the story out there, making it easy for people to get involved and creating triggers or reminders for people to do the right thing.

We also found from our research that there needs to be a big push towards litter education and the damages it is causing so people will be motivated to get involved in the first place.

Reflection

Understanding the client’s brief and getting them to align on their individual needs was quite hard and time-consuming.

But getting this step right was crucial, or we would have been solving the wrong problem.

At the start it felt like we were getting all the wrong answers, so we had to question our questions.

Since they weren’t able to articulate what they needed, we helped them define it by getting them to tell us what they didn’t need.

Being open-minded with the team and creating a collaborative space where everyone can voice their thoughts, led to a solution that we could all be proud of.

References