Assorted links

1) Atlanta is testing out an incentivized recycling program where residents can earn and exchange points for “rewards, gift cards, groceries, and products” with participating retailers. (Hat tip: Mike Erskine)

2a) Rewarding first-graders for eating fruits and vegetables with small prizes.

2b) “‘If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,’ says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.” From Scientific American.

(Hat tips: Christopher Daggett)

3) A scale that tells the world how much you weigh via Twitter. (Hat tip: Justin Holz)

4) Photos of calorie counting nudges at Freakonomics.

Musical stairs

Thanks to all the Nudge blog readers who pointed us to this terrific video from Sweden that asks: How can choice architects get people to use the stairs instead of the escalator?

For others curious about the background: The videos are part of something called the Fun Theory project (sponsored by Volkswagen it appears) that, according to its web site, is dedicated to coming up with fun ways to do things we otherwise wouldn’t, usually because of sheer laziness. Like throwing away the trash.

Assorted links

1) Many readers pointed to a story on a study about the effect of posting calories in fast food restaurants. Customers noticed the signs and thought they influenced their orders. But they actually ordered food with more calories. Reader Paul Zurawski wonders if customers would have eaten healthier if they had been asked to sign a receipt acknowledging their choices and calorie counts.

2) The top ten annoying alarm clocks. Clocky is No. 1. Hat tip: Daniel Lee.

3) Google’s PowerMeter now works with a handheld device that starts at about $200. What this means is that you would not need a utility company to install a smart meter in your building. Hat tip: Christopher Daggett.

4) The San Francisco airport has begun selling carbon offsets at the electronic check-in kiosks. Philip Frankenfeld has many catchy slogans for this nudge including “Pay dime. Help clime” and “You are now free to roam around the carbon”.

Addendum 5) A vase that lets you know when your flower needs watering. As water evaporates, the vase tilts. Hat tip: John Gibbard.

Nudge grants in action: Social norms and cutting carbon

Long time Nudge blog readers may remember the London borough of Barnet, which received money last year for nudge grants. One of those grants went toward a pilot project that taps into social norms to reduce residents’ carbon footprints by asking them to walk more, lower the heat, and take other simple steps that can protect the planet.

A traditional persuasive strategy would be based on stressing how this could benefit the environment. But the council is going further in testing out techniques of influence.

The residents are asked to make pledges in a face-to-face conversation with one of the canvassers who have been going door-to-door in this area.

They are only asked to make some limited pledges – to choose three out of nine options on the pledge card they are shown.

And posters on lampposts proclaim the number of households in that street who have agreed to participate.

The BBC just produced a 38-minute program, Persuading Us to Be Good, about this project and other nudge friendly ideas in the U.K. (Richard Thaler is featured in the program.) As Barnet Council leader Mike Freer says, “We’ve got to stop nagging. If nagging worked we’d all be skinny, we’d all be recycling and we’d all be walking to work.” Listen to it here.

The National University of Singapore nudges

Marcus Tay Guan Hock, Sustainability Executive at the National University of Singapore, writes in to say that Nudge “gives me hope as an environmentalist,” and explains how the school used principles of choice architecture to redesign its recycling program.

Here at the National University of Singapore (NUS), we designed our recycling bins to tackle the issue of contamination, applying what you called “Expect Error” from users.

When users throw the wrong things in the recycling bins, it wastes the efforts of those who recycled properly. For example, paper bins are often contaminated with food waste, rendering all of the paper unrecyclable.

This situation is rather serious in Singapore. A Straits Times Article on June 15, “What rubbish,” indicates non-recyclable waste found in all 80 recycling bins surveyed.

At NUS, we did the following two things. They have worked wonders.

At the point of disposal, we help people decide if the item can be recycled using proper and clear labels. These labels are designed so that before users can throw trash into the bin, they will see the labels which instruct them what can and cannot be thrown.

We give people an option not to throw garbage into the recycling bin if the garbage cannot be recycled by pairing every set of recycling bins with a trash bin as well. Because some people are not yet environmentally conscious, they just want to get rid of the rubbish in their hands, whether it can be recycled or not.

A pre-earth day nudge: “Paper, plastic, or personal?”

Using canvas shopping bags at the grocery story instead of the usual paper or plastic ones is one small way to help save the planet. Many companies have adopted strategies for encouraging people to bring their own bags from home by giving small rebates, charging small fees for plastic bags, or placing displays for reusable bags near the checkout counter.

Reader Will Katz sends along another approach stores may want to consider using. Instead of asking customers if they want to use “Paper or plastic?” Katz suggests that clerks tweak the question by asking “Paper, plastic, or personal?” He says there are lots of advantages.

-It costs nothing to implement.
-It plants the seed of an idea in shoppers’ minds and reinforces it every time they shop.
-It keeps the alliteration, making it more memorable.
-As more people got in the habit, bag usage would extend to other stores or shopping situations.
-If the supermarket provided canvas bags for sale at the checkout area, implementation would be immediate.

And if supermarkets didn’t provide canvas bags in the checkout aisle (say, because the markup on candy is a lot better), reminding the customer about reusable bags would still be a worthy service.

More on exactly how SmartSwitch works from the Stanford duo

Readers have been very interested in Peter Russo and Brendan Wypich’s SmartSwitch. There have been a number of requests for the guys to explain more about the tactile feedback piece of the technology. Straight from the source, here’s the technical explanation of how it works:

A low-power microprocessor embedded in the SmartSwitch receives and interprets data from the network. (The “network” may consist of sensors, other switches, a home energy-monitoring system, the central office of the power company, etc.) Based on that data, the microprocessor controls the position of a linear servomotor, which presses a brake pad down onto the sliding mechanism of the switch. The harder the brake presses, the more difficult it becomes to physically slide the switch.

Refinements to the mechanism will be made in the next version of the SmartSwitch. For example, while the linear servomotor — an off-the-shelf device typically used by remote-control model hobbyists — is great for prototyping, it’s likely too big, noisy, and expensive to be used in an actual product. We’re also exploring ways to alter the gesture — rather than the force — required to flip the switch.

The two also say that, depending on how SmartSwitch is configured, there are lots of potential applications.

-If configured to respond to a household-specific energy consumption goal (say, to use less than 200 kWh of electricity per month), the switch can become harder to turn on if it looks like the goal isn’t going to be met.

-If configured to respond to a neighborhood’s energy consumption, the switch can become harder to turn on if your household usage is above the neighborhood average.

-If connected to a light sensor, the switch can become harder to turn on if the ambient light level is already high.

-If configured to respond to grid-wide electricity demand, the switch can become harder to turn on during times of peak usage.

We plan to explore these (and other) applications when we roll the SmartSwitch out to users through a pilot study. We also imagine that point-of-use tactile feedback could be used in other controls — such as thermostats — that potentially offer even more substantial energy savings.

We’ll keep you updated on SmartSwitch’s progress.

Two Stanford students rethink the light switch

Peter Russo and Brendan Wypich have found a way to combine the Ambient Orb, the EcoPedal, and the competitive utility bill into one amazing nudge. As second year master’s students in the Stanford Design Program, the two have designed what they are calling a SmartSwitch, which lets people know how much energy they are using, not through colors, but through tactile feedback. It was recently named a semi-finalist in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We asked the two to describe their technology in a guest post for the Nudge blog. If you like the idea, you can vote for SmartSwitch here.

Continue reading the post here.

Should the U.S. government create a default rule that cuts down on the amount of ink used in printing? It already has.

A company called SPRANQ is promoting a free ecofont that it says reduces the amount ink used for a given word by as much as 20 percent. The font, which saves ink by stamping holes in each letter, is not aesthetically pleasing, making it better suited for internal documents. Who needs a draft print-out to look polished, anyway? Perhaps the U.S. government could adopt this as the default font for certain memos and documents?

If adopted, it wouldn’t be the first time the government set a default rule for printing that saves ink. In 1994, Congress passed the Vegetable Ink Printing Act, requiring government printers (and private printers hired through federal contracts) to use vegetable-based inks, which are primarily soy-based these days. The fine print on how much vegetable ink to use in different kinds of printed products, and when exceptions can be made is in the U.S. Code. (For example, for “news ink,” the minimum requirement is 40 percent vegetable ink.)

One of the arguments for the change was that a gallon of vegetable ink was more efficient than a gallon of the old stuff. Coincidentally, documents published with it were said to use as much as 20 percent less ink than petroleum ink.

The initial cost of the vegetable ink is higher, (the premium is 33 percent; 60 cents/pound versus 80/pound according to this report), but proponents say there is an overall net savings because of the costs of clean-up, disposal, and amount of paper waste produced during a press run are lower with vegetable ink. Besides, the cost of ink is a minor bit compared to the costs of printing labor and equipment. Either way, the ink is much more environmentally friendly than petroleum ink.

The head of printing at the U.S. Geological Service put the benefit this way: “So ‘yes’, soy ink makes us compliant with the Vegetable Printing Act as well as (Environmental Protection Agency) and (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) regulations. It’s also technically superior and more efficient, but the bottom line is that we produce a better map.”

Just how did this default rule come about? This being the work of Congress, the decision was imbued with political nudging. The American Soybean Association is happy to take credit, claiming in an annual report that it, along with state soybean organizations, “successfully lobb(ied) Congress” to pass the bill. If this 1994 hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations is any indication, it wasn’t tough sledding. The Government Printing Office had no objections, and pretty much everyone else on the witness list either represented soybean growers or represented a state with soybean growers. The oil-based ink folks were left out. Ultimately, the bill passed on a voice vote in the House and Senate.

What kind of an effect did a change in the default rule have?

In 1992, two years before the Act passed, the federal government’s consumption of vegetable ink, both in-house and via private printer, was less than 400,000 pounds, out of a total of about 2.4 million pounds of ink. At the time, for technological reasons, many government printing presses were unable to handle vegetable ink, the bulk of which was from flax oil, not soy beans, then.

In 1995, the year after the Act passed, 169,000 pounds of vegetable inks were used for in-house printing, while 2 million more pounds were used by private contractor printers. Assuming, that the amount of materials printed in both years was approximately the same, which is reasonable, that’s quite an achievement for such a simple switch.