Solid waste management has become a critical municipal and environmental concern in India during recent years. Biodegradable waste is a major constituent of large landfills that can be seen in many major cities in the country. This waste releases methane, which could potentially become a much bigger contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide. Equally disturbing sights of minor dumping grounds of solid waste are frequent in most of the cities. Waste management policies till date have mostly relied on ‘end-of-pipe’ strategies like recycling, that promote waste pre-processing prior to disposal. However, the scale of the problem increases the costs of efficient waste disposal at the aggregate level. Hence, it has become imperative to supplement these strategies with waste prevention, classification and segregation at much earlier stages at the individual and household level.
In this study, we attempt to use ‘green nudges’ (based on insights from behavioural economics) to ‘gently push individuals in the right direction’ towards proper waste segregation and waste prevention. We propose to implement a programme of multiple nudges in a small city in north-Western India. This would include informational nudges through social media and radio campaigns highlighting the benefits of waste segregation, sharing and publicly praising individual and community success stories at public spaces, and the installation of blue and green public dustbins, with pictorial images on the dustbins about what kind of waste should go in each.
Further, we propose to reduce the incidence of small dumping grounds by measures such as the use of historic/religious/socially-important symbols at open places to discourage waste disposal, involving local residents of the sub-regions by putting their pictures on hoardings with quotes discouraging people from littering, increasing the number of public dustbins, and beautification of open places through planting flowers/mini-gardens/wall paintings.
We plan to use a regression discontinuity approach to determine a causal impact of the aforementioned green nudges. For this, we propose to collect individual-level data to assess behavioural change over two dimensions, viz. change in beliefs and behaviour towards waste segregation at the individual level, and change in beliefs and behaviour towards littering. The various sub-regions of the city would be randomly allotted to treatment and control groups for this purpose, and data would be collected both pre- and post-treatment to identify the causal impact of this exercise.
Through these experiments, we hope to identify the efficiency of various nudges at the city-level in reducing solid waste. The Indian government has recently taken a large number of initiatives in using nudges towards promoting environmentally sustainable behaviour and practices, and is encouraging research in this direction to identify successful nudges. Thus, we hope that the successful nudges in our experiments could be potentially scaled up to a national level.
dges in our experiments could be potentially scaled up to a national level.