Dissertation Chapter 7

This study has attempted to innovate, optimize and test designs of two environmental shopping educational campaigns in Manhattan supermarkets to impart information and motivation to shoppers, with the expectation that the knowledge gained would give rise to new, environmental shopping habits. To do this, varied approaches and devices to communicate with and motivate shoppers, that had been successful in other studies, were used, previously problematic approaches were avoided, and new strategies were pioneered. One feature differentiating the environmental shopping campaign employed here from others that had been tried before was that it was implemented in a densely populated area and conducted in small, crowded stores. The store was used to sell diaper service, a unique feature of this campaign, and videos were shown above the checkout registers in one store. Also, a central objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign in achieving the desired results, to compare the two campaigns conducted to one another, and to examine the impact made by each of the educational devices used. The effectiveness of the campaigns was evaluated by means of baseline and follow-up surveys of the same shoppers at two stores, before and after receiving two levels of educational treatment. The answers to the survey questions, the data, were analyzed using a range of statistical techniques including tabulations, cross-tabulations, mean differences between pairs, and path analysis, to determine absolute and comparative effectiveness of the campaigns, and of the individual educational materials. These results contribute to the existing body of knowledge in this field, and are helpful to those planning to implement environmental shopping campaigns in the future.

Changing Behaviors via Education

At the beginning of the educational campaign, the shoppers’ attitudes towards environmental concepts and conservation, in general, were quite positive, with over half to two-thirds agreeing with all the statements that would indicate a predisposition towards the environment (e.g., a willingness to change to an environmentally friendly supermarket, beliefs that environmental shopping is good for the environment, and that people consume too much). But there appeared to be a disconnect between the shoppers’ level of environmental knowledge and attitudes, and their actual behaviors. Whereas the shoppers tended to have positive attitudes and a high level of knowledge about the city's recycling program and did recycle, shoppers did not exhibit a convincing propensity to implement the entire collection of environmental shopping behaviors that were the focus of the educational treatments. On the pro-environment side, and in absolute terms, a vast majority (80 to 85%) of shoppers from the east and west side stores recycled cans, bottles, and magazines and 55 to 60% brought back deposit bottles and cans after the campaign. Half the shoppers (50 to 55%) bought refills and concentrates, and 42 to 52% did not buy products in single-serving packaging. On the anti-environment side, it was clear that most shoppers (60 to 75%) never or infrequently brought their own bags to the supermarket, and 40-50% always or frequently bought disposable products after the campaign.

A comparison of baseline and follow-up surveys of shoppers receiving the educational treatments and of those who did not, provide some insight into what extent environmental awareness, attitudes, and behaviors of shoppers were modified after exposure to environmental shopping campaigns, and what it takes to make those changes. On the face of it, and similar to the results of most of the studies reviewed in the last chapter, the educational campaign did not have an unequivocally positive effect on shoppers’ environmental purchasing behaviors as had been hoped. Some of the environmental shopping behaviors that were part of the educational focus, did seem to increase after the campaign. Shoppers at both stores increased purchases of refills and concentrates (10 to 20%), the already frequent recycling of cans and bottles increased slightly (~5%), bringing deposit containers back increased (~15%), and shoppers at the east side store brought bags to the store slightly more often than before. In other cases, the desired environmental shopping behavior decreased; purchasing of recyclable packaging decreased (~12% overall) at both stores.

It had been anticipated that the higher the level of intervention (i.e., the extent to which a group of shoppers saw an educational device and/or remembered a message), the greater would be the positive effect on the shoppers’ environmental behaviors. But different levels of interventions at the two stores were not consistently associated with positive or with negative changes in knowledge or behavior after the campaign. Certain cohorts of intervention respondents (e.g., those who remembered seeing brochures) exhibited improved environmental shopping behavior vs. the control group, after exposure to more educational devices. For example, with increasing educational intervention, the intervention respondents were 12-30% more likely than the controls to bring deposit containers back to the west side store, a few to 25% bought refills and concentrates more often, and at the east side store 20-36% bought fewer disposables than the controls. But in other cases, the educational treatments seemed to have a more negative impact on the intervention respondents' practice of environmental behaviors vs. the controls. Purchases of single-serving packaging by intervention respondents increased 5 to 30% as compared with the controls, their purchases of products in recyclable packaging decreased 12-27% in the west side store, and patronage of repair shops decreased from 4-22% during the campaign vs. the controls. In other cases, behaviors increased for some intervention cohorts or at one store but not for another (e.g., buying disposable products). In general, those receiving and remembering the campaign information at the east side store reported more environmentally friendly habits than the intervention groups at the west side store. Underlying the impact of the campaign on the intervention shoppers, and probably influencing some of the anti-environmental trends, was a foundation of decreasing recycling knowledge and environmental behaviors on the part of all the shoppers. This effect was evidenced by the fact that as many as 50% more of the controls, those who did not see any educational intervention, gave incorrect answers about New York City's recycling program after the campaign (vs. before), and as much as 50% fewer controls indicated they received recycling information after vs. before the campaign.

Clearly, something or perhaps a few factors outside the control of the educational campaign could have been at work, influencing the shoppers’ behaviors and even their knowledge of the City’s recycling program. The two path analyses showed that environmental behaviors of our shoppers were influenced only to a minor degree by the amount of environmental or recycling knowledge possessed by the shoppers, and that their shopping behavior was influenced considerably more by their environmental attitudes and unknown influencing factors outside the campaign. King County and others’ research[1], described earlier, showed that barriers to environmental behaviors can thwart the good intentions of brochures and educational programs. New York shoppers face perhaps more barriers than shoppers in many parts of the country because supermarkets are smaller, and more crowded than most, and are visually “busy”, with competing visual images and promotions. Since this campaign was conducted at holiday time, Christmas music competed on an auditory level with the campaign’s messages.

Extrinsic factors, such as cost and inconvenience, may have impeded the shoppers’ adoption of new behaviors. For example, the cost of living in Manhattan is the highest in the country, [2] hence shoppers here are likely to consider product price more important than in other locales. Where price is more important, other factors such as environmental impact, become less important. Since more shoppers brought their cans and bottles back to the store for the deposit after the campaign, while at the same time recycling fewer at home after the campaign, this also signals a shift by shoppers towards more extrinsic motivations for recycling at the time of the campaign. One possible explanation for this was that the holiday season may have not only diverted shoppers’ attention away from the educational campaign, but may have also influenced them not to experiment with new purchasing habits and to save money for holiday expenses.

In New York, due to its unique characteristics, shopping can be inconvenient; Manhattanites typically have to carry their groceries home several blocks in bags by hand, so such factors as the weight of products can affect their purchasing behaviors more than elsewhere, where cars are used to transport groceries. In fact, it is so difficult to navigate grocery carts through the narrow, crowded aisles, they aren’t used much in Manhattan stores, so shoppers usually carry their purchases around with them through the store in large plastic baskets. The survey results support the notion that convenience may have been a barrier to buying products in recyclable packaging, due to the added weight of dilute products and recyclable packaging (glass and metal), but it would not have been a barrier to buying refills and concentrates, since they are lighter. Similarly, shoppers’ perceptions (correct or not) that diaper service is more inconvenient and more expensive, as well as campaign-related factors (i.e., shoppers’ non-receipt of diaper service offers), are likely to have caused the failure of this educational effort. Finally, the shift that permitted the Republican Revolution to occur (with its clearly anti-environment sentiments being broadcast in the media) was just beginning at the time the follow-up surveys were taking place, possibly creating a negative mood towards the environment. Social pressures against the environment could have been at work. Despite the barriers and other factors influencing shopper behavior, shoppers did buy refills and concentrates, bring deposit containers, and to some extent, carry cloth bags to the store more often after the campaign.

One of the objectives of the research was to determine if the increased educational effort (i.e., having videos, volunteer literature tabling and extra brochure distributions) at the west-side store would result in a greater increase in environmental behavior at that store. Contrary to expectations, where there was much of a difference in the change in behavior of shoppers who received the interventions at the two stores, the east side shoppers reported more net increases (or lower net decreases) in environmental behavior as compared with the west side shoppers. Examples of this more environmentally friendly behavior at the east side store included a lower net decrease of purchasing recyclable packaging and patronizing of repair shops, and less of an increase in purchasing single-serving packaging and disposable products. By contrast, those receiving the heaviest educational treatment (remembered brochures and video or resources message in the west side store), generally seemed to retain more of their knowledge about the City’s recycling program and environmental shopping after the campaign than any other group in either store.

That the west side shoppers would retain more of the environmental knowledge presented during the campaign than their east side counterparts, is easy to understand and was expected. That the same west side shoppers would, at the same time, improve their environmental shopping behaviors to a lesser extent after the campaign, is more puzzling and underscores the disconnect between shopper knowledge and behavior, already discussed. Recalling that the two stores were chosen such that the populations were matched on the basis of race and income, it would be difficult to argue that race or income would have influenced this outcome. The west-side shoppers may have experienced a greater number of outside negative influences or barriers to environmental shopping than the east-side shoppers (e.g., the more crowded nature of the store). The east side shoppers might have fewer barriers to practicing certain environmental behaviors (e.g., a greater number of thrift shops available).

Designing the Most Effective Campaign

One of the purposes of this investigation was to determine the characteristics of a successful environmental shopping campaign. This section describes what was learned, not only from the experience of conducting two environmental shopping campaigns in New York City, but also by comparison of these experiences with other campaigns.

As mentioned previously, Simmons and Widmar[3] suggested that waste prevention represents a new set of behavior patterns for most people. Therefore, environmental shopping programs would need to deploy more educational devices and approaches, continuously, using different approaches at different times, in a more intensive manner, than recycling program education in order to be successful in reaching the various target populations. This notion is supported by the fact that the Gristede’s shoppers had received decidedly more education about recycling than about environmental shopping prior to the educational campaign, and from a variety of sources, and therefore environmental shopping education would need to be thorough, intense, and prolonged to make up lost ground.

The two government-supported, multi-county, San Francisco Shop Smart campaigns were important in illustrating that an environmental shopping campaign can motivate hundreds of thousands of people in a large metropolitan area to adopt more environmentally-friendly behaviors. As to whether the degree of behavioral change was significant was not clear. (The percentages of shoppers practicing the environmental shopping behaviors after the Shop Smart campaigns were relatively low (10 to 30%), as compared with the Gristede’s shoppers queried after our campaign, 25 to 75% of whom participated in the recycling and environmental shopping behaviors sometimes, often, or always.) An explanatory factor for the apparently smaller behavioral change in San Francisco could be that the Shop Smart brochure was distributed to a much smaller fraction of San Francisco area shoppers as compared with the fraction of east and west side shoppers receiving brochures in the Gristede’s stores. The Illinois study also showed that no one remembered getting a brochure, and as a result, there was a statistically insignificant change in environmental shopping behaviors there, indicating the importance of the size and intensity of the education effort in reaching shoppers.

It may be that in addition to saturation (i.e., a high percentage of shoppers seeing the information), a successful program also requires that shoppers not only see but also remember messages from at least some minimum number and diversity of educational devices (e.g., riveting signs and brochures), delivered via a variety of different means, continuously. This conclusion agrees with Geller and Lehman,[4] who found that the most successful campaigns are likely to be those which utilize a diverse set of strategies to induce and promote desired behaviors, since different people respond to different stimuli.

A narrowed educational focus, as was adopted for this study, should also be more successful, since fewer things to focus on result in less confusion and less to remember. The second Shop Smart campaign in San Francisco reduced the variety of messages in an attempt to improve shopper retention and implementation of the messages.

Along these lines, designing an environmental shopping educational campaign to take place over a longer period of time (or continuously), as Simmons and Widmar suggest, would also appear to make sense, since it was clear from this and other studies that only a fraction of shoppers remember the educational materials. More exposure to the materials and repetition of the messages (perhaps in different formats) over a longer time frame, increases the likelihood that more shoppers see the message. Since changing habits not only requires that shoppers know what the desired behavior is and why it is beneficial and easy, it also requires practice. Habits are not established overnight. The Minnesota study, conducted over a week, showed no changes in shopper behaviors during that time, underscoring that more time is needed to change behavior.

Another strategy to improve the impact of an environmental shopping campaign would be to give shoppers more intensive instruction, free cloth bags, and constant encouragement and monitoring, to increase the likelihood that the shopper received the information, was motivated, and had no impediments (lack of a bag). This approach was tried in the Suffolk County study, and naturally, a large fraction of those given the educational treatment participated in the target behavior (bringing a bag). But such a strategy conducted on a large scale would likely be prohibitively expensive and impractical, since not everyone will sit still for hours of instruction and maintain diaries for weeks. Designing an environmental shopping campaign that is practical, effective, but not too expensive is a challenge.

Designing Effective Environmental Materials and Displays

The Gristede’s campaigns described here employed a number of educational materials, each designed to impart different educational and motivational messages and to serve different purposes within the educational program. Some devices conveyed the message quickly, almost instantaneously (e.g., the environmental shopper bag displays, the posters and the brightly-colored, high-contrast Bring Your Own Bag signs). These cloth bags and signs quickly imparted the environmental shopping message to the shoppers, and consequently, were noticed by the greatest number (two-thirds) of the shoppers (prompted and unprompted). Other campaign materials, the brochures and the videos, required a few minutes of attention on the part of the shoppers, but provided more in-depth information, motivation, and suggested behaviors. It was understood that there would be times when shoppers wouldn’t have much time or patience to read brochures or watch videos, but on the other hand there would be times where idle minutes would be spent standing at the checkout line. The experience at the Gristede’s stores has suggested that the educational materials that imparted the message quickly were the most effective in being remembered by shoppers (a first step in changing behavior), and possibly more such attention-grabbing, signs or flyers should have been designed to impart different messages. Also, deploying a variety of educational materials is important, since some people only have time or interest for the short messages, but others might need to read more to be persuaded.

The results of this study and the comparisons with other studies also suggest that the educational messages must not only be informational and motivational about the intrinsic reasons to participate in the desired behavior, but must also contain credible information about how various barriers (e.g., cost, inconvenience) to participating in the environmental behavior can be overcome. The Minnesota posters included direct comparisons of the cost and waste generated by an environmental product with its less-environmental counterpart (e.g., concentrates), to address the perceived economic barrier as well as to provide positive motivation. However, these posters were very large, and were in muted colors, so the size made them impractical for New York City stores and they were not as eye-catching as the NYCDOS Bring Your Own Bag signs, so were not noticed nearly as much. Thus, designing educational materials that are sized appropriately and are attention riveting, and deliver short, informative, and persuasive messages, is critical to having the messages remembered.

The results of this study also suggest that even minor differences in how an educational brochure or video is displayed in the store can be extremely important to its impact on shoppers. The fact that many of the survey respondents did not recall one or more of the educational features, or required prompting to remember them, indicates that it is of utmost importance to place educational materials in displays that look like the store supports the campaign, and that the displays be located where the shoppers will have the opportunity to see the display and receive the message.

Designing Environmental Shopping Campaigns for Different Demographics

One of the original research objectives was to determine if there is a relationship between demographics and shoppers’ environmental knowledge, attitudes and purchasing behavior, and source of environmental information. There was not a great deal of disparity amongst the demographic groups (usually less than a few tenths of a point measured on a scale of 1 to 5 separated the different demographic groups on most questions). These data do not make a case for emphasizing certain environmental messages more than others to different demographic groups, with one exception. Where there was some disparity in the answers given by men and women, it was the women who exhibited more environmental behaviors and attitudes (though the mean differences were in the vicinity of 0.5 on a scale of 1 to 5).

Clearly, the diaper experiment was not successful, since no one signed up to receive the service. The data showed that almost all of the survey respondents purchasing disposable diapers never received the diaper service offer, and this was due to factors within the control of the supermarket. Thus, in-store educational programs may not be effective locations for encouraging shoppers to switch from disposable diapers to diaper service, unless there is surer way of transmitting persuasive information to those who purchase disposable diapers. The packaging of the diaper offer was also not flashy enough to attract attention, even if the holders on the shelf had stayed in place.

On the other hand, the campaign’s bag experiment was more successful. The bags themselves and the DOS Bring Your Own Bag signs were the two most remembered features of the campaign, and shoppers self-reported bringing their own bags more frequently to the east side store after the campaign. Hundreds of environmental shopper cloth bags were sold at the checkout counters at both stores. This is particularly noteworthy, since Gristede’s considered its prior effort to sell canvas shopping bags to be unsuccessful.

There are certain times of year that are more and less auspicious for conducting environmental shopping campaigns. During the holiday season, as was the case for this study, shoppers are more likely to be rushed, pinched for funds, and facing other pressures which can impede their ability to learn and actually practice new behaviors. The supermarkets themselves are also more hectic during the holidays than at other times of the year because of special product lines and holiday promotions. If the educational campaigns had been successful during holiday season, maybe they would have been successful at other times of year. It is possible that the campaign might have been more successful if conducted at another time.

Conducting environmental shopping education campaigns in New York City supermarkets presents a challenge due to the cramped nature of the stores and the harried quality of New York City shoppers and supermarket managers. While there is a potential benefit to be gained by educating shoppers right at the point of decision-making or purchase, it may be asking too much to get the shoppers to focus on a brochure, sign, or video amidst other competing promotions, to learn new information and to transform their shopping habits, while at the same time remembering their list of groceries to buy, balancing their grocery budget, and getting home in time to cook dinner. On the other hand, too few environmental shopping campaigns have attempted to innovate a sufficiently large, sustained, panoply of approaches and educational devices to determine for sure that most shoppers cannot be reached by environmental shopping campaigns. Product advertising employs billions of dollars annually to impart messages in ever changing, innovative ways (e.g., using attractive images of landscapes and food, cartoon characters, movie stars, sports figures) to move people to consume. If there were a more level playing field between money spent for product advertising and money spent for environmental shopping education, or if the product manufacturer themselves were to tout the environmental aspects of their products, it is more likely that environmental attributes would have a more important role in consumer decision-making.

From the point-of-view of the educator, a city or state solid waste agency, whose mission is to instill waste prevention behaviors into as many of its citizens, using as few resources, and in as little time as possible, a supermarket-based environmental shopping campaign can be quite labor- and/or cost- intensive. In addition, it only reaches some of those who frequent the store. This study indicates that the shoppers’ environmental knowledge came to a lesser extent from in-store sources such as posters, brochures, and videos, and that their recycling education came to a greater extent from TV, building management, and newspapers. Their environmental shopping knowledge came from newspapers, TV and their friends and neighbors. However, none of the educational devices used in the stores reached anywhere close to 100% of the shoppers. Since such saturation this is usually a goal of educational programs, utilizing a combination of educational devices and approaches (intrinsic and extrinsic motivations), including those that are store-based, seems warranted if sufficient human and monetary resources are available. Thus, a supermarket-based campaign, if designed to optimize the number and mixture of attention-riveting educational materials, displayed professionally with the assistance of store staff over a long enough period, can be a useful adjunct to a large-scale program like San Francisco’s with intensive media advertising and news coverage.

Clearly, it is also necessary to have a supermarket that has room enough, and staff that is supportive enough, to provide a suitable location for display and dissemination of the educational materials.

Recommendations

There are two main avenues that those responsible for managing solid waste can follow in achieving the objectives of reducing consumer-generated supermarket packaging and product wastes. The first involves designing and implementing an environmental shopping educational program, as discussed in this study. It is unlikely that any entity has carried out the “perfect” campaign to date, because it would probably be prohibitively expensive to do so. After all, environmental shopping campaigns are attempting to undo the behavioral changes and habits created by decades of expensive, targeted product advertising. If any environmental shopping campaign could be successful, it would have to mirror product advertising (i.e., take place continuously over a long period of time, would involve market research into effective ways of imparting information and motivation, frequently varying the educational materials, intensive media and print advertising, all store personnel cooperating enthusiastically, and in-store saturation with lots of volunteers handing out leaflets, etc. (see specific recommendations, below)).

The other approach to reducing consumer-generated supermarket wastes, which may ultimately prove to be more fruitful and cost-effective, is to pursue legislation, incentives/disincentives, and education directed at the packaging and product designers, manufacturers and retailers. Such approaches would encourage those that create and market products to provide more environmentally desirable alternatives (and to discontinue less environmentally desirable alternatives).

For greatest effect, both approaches should be implemented simultaneously. The statistical basis for this recommendation is that the results from this and similar environmental shopping campaigns were equivocal insofar as the effectiveness of such campaigns at changing consumer shopping behavior. If shoppers are to purchase fewer disposables, overly packaged products, and non-recyclable packaging, a more substantial, ongoing campaign would be needed to raise awareness, break down barriers, and provide positive feedback, etc. But environmental shopping campaigns will never reach 100% of the shopping population (recalling the Roper Poll and the categorization of people's environmental predispositions, with some as openly hostile towards environmental values). So a campaign to motivate product and packaging designers (via intrinsic and extrinsic means), if successful, would provide fewer environmentally undesirable choices and more environmentally desirable products and packaging. The end result would be the same: greater purchase of environmentally desirable products and packaging and greater avoidance of unrecyclable, overly packaged, and/or disposable goods.

Implement Optimized Store-Based Environmental Shopping Campaigns

If the policy decision is made to design and carry out the optimal environmental shopping campaign, there are still constraints that will require a modification of expectations.

Designing an environmental shopping education program for a city cannot involve personalized instruction for everyone, since monetary and practical constraints are too great.

A successful program requires an adequate number and diversity of educational devices (including a media campaign), delivered to the shopper via a variety of means, since the most successful campaigns are likely to be those utilizing a diverse set of strategies to induce and promote desired behaviors. It is important to employ a sufficient mixture of quickly read, easy-to-understand, attention-riveting messages via flyers, small bright signs, strategically placed, which cover all the campaign messages. Designing educational materials to deliver short, informative, and persuasive messages is critical to having the messages remembered by the most shoppers. Since some people only have time or interest for the short messages, some may be influenced by monetary messages, but others might need to be persuaded more (recall the Roper Poll's categorization of people by their environmental predisposition), it is important to deploy as large a variety of educational materials as possible.

In order that the shoppers not be overwhelmed by too many messages (i.e., demands for different changes in behavior), the campaign materials should focus on a limited number of environmentally friendly behaviors at one time. Addressing not only the intrinsic reasons for adopting an environmental shopping behavior (i.e., it's the right thing to do), but also extrinsic reasons (e.g., it's cheaper) in the educational messages, is important for maximizing the effect of the educational materials. It is also important to dispel common misconceptions about any barriers to implementing the desired behavior, and to demonstrate how easy it is to implement the new behaviors.

It is important to distribute enough educational materials and conduct sufficient media advertising to saturate the intended population to ensure that a sufficient percentage of shoppers see the information, many times, if possible. The precise quantity of materials would depend on the venue (i.e., supermarkets configured such that all shoppers would have to see certain posters, signs, videos at some point during their shopping visit would be more effective, and require less materials). Similarly, with media advertising, some TV and radio spots are much more effective at grabbing attention than others, so well-designed, innovative advertisements would be a part of an optimal supermarket-based campaign, and would require less investment.

Designing an environmental shopping educational campaign to take place continuously and intensively is recommended, since it was clear from this and other studies that only a fraction of shoppers are exposed to, or remember, the educational materials when the campaigns last for only a few weeks to a few months. Product advertisers realize that campaigns cannot be finite. New consumers are always being born and others moving on; and as other societal factors change over time, campaigns must be redesigned to retain effectiveness. Similarly, if environmental shopping campaigns were to employ more of the methods of product advertisers, they may reach and convince more shoppers.

The fact that 60 to 95% of the Gristede's survey respondents did not immediately recall one or more of the seven educational features, requiring prompting to remember them, indicates that it is of utmost importance to have eye-catching designs, to place them in displays that look like the store supports the campaign, and to locate the displays where the shoppers will have the opportunity to see the display and receive the message. Having brochures available in sturdy, official-looking holders and given out by volunteers at tables or at the checkout area will also facilitate their distribution to and examination by shoppers. Having large store-front posters with a project logo and message at all times also demonstrates the supermarket's commitment to environmental shopping, and can generate more interest in the message.

In order to more accurately measure the impact of an educational campaign on shopper behavior, so that future campaigns can be more effective, it is necessary to have access to computerized purchasing information, and preferably Club Cards, to track purchases of individuals over time. Having to depend on delivery invoices or inventory to estimate customer purchases over short periods of time produces inaccurate information and can be impractical. In order to reduce unwanted effects on the data, agreements must be made, in advance, with the store chain to keep prices and store locations of target products stable throughout the experimental period.

One of the most important findings of this study was that the degree of support the store chain, store management and personnel are able to provide can seriously affect the success of an environmental shopping campaign, so not every store can be a candidate for such a voluntary campaign. In recruiting a store or store chain, it is important, not only to have verbal agreements but it is essential to have the enthusiastic support for each and every aspect of the campaign very early in the planning process from the highest levels of the organization, and from all who will be involved, from President to data managers, store managers, and cashiers.

In order to optimize the effectiveness of supermarket-based environmental shopping programs further, future research should investigate the barriers that prevent shoppers from receiving educational treatments in stores and from putting new behaviors into practice, and how consumers can overcome them.

Since changing shoppers’ behavior depends only partly on how well they are educated to be environmental shoppers, approaches need to be innovated to encourage or require designers, manufacturers, and retailers to create more environmentally friendly packaging and products, so that consumers don't have to think about making the right choices. In many cases shoppers have no choice but to buy products in non-recyclable packaging or that are excessively packaged. The same is true for disposable items; shelf space is often not provided for the durable alternative.

Retailers should be encouraged to devote more shelf space to environmentally preferable products, to label these products as such, use circulars to educate consumers about environmentally preferable products, and to locate pairs of products (e.g., concentrates with non-concentrates, recyclable packaging with non-recyclable packaging) in close proximity in the store.

Retailers could be encouraged or required to sell cloth bags and to charge for each disposable bag given, to redirect shoppers’ habits towards the more environmentally preferable alternative.

So that those responsible for designing and marketing disposable products, overly packaged products, or those packaged in non-recyclable packaging could be discouraged from marketing such environmentally undesirable products and packaging, advance disposal fees could be levied on designers and manufacturers. Tax credits on environmentally preferable products, such as those with little packaging or great durability, could be used to encourage marketing of environmentally preferable products.

This investigation, and comparison with others like it, shows that in order for environmental shopping campaigns to have even moderate success, there must be considerable planning, expenditure of funds and effort, and cooperative retailers. Such campaigns are complex, and fraught with the potential for problems in execution. Though it is undoubtedly true that further research and experience with supermarket-based campaigns could produce advances in the optimization of educational materials and strategies, and eventually provide significant positive changes in shopping behavior by a majority of the subjects, this is not the case at present.

Though it is also true that incentives, legislation, and other measures to persuade or require manufacturers of grocery products are not used on a widespread basis, it is clear that the potential for success (significantly more environmental shopping by consumers) would be great if manufacturers provided consumers with only environmentally-sound choices. Over the last decade or so, governments and businesses have just been starting to seriously evaluate manufacturing processes to minimize waste generated, and at the same time save money. Lifecycle investigations, comparing the environmental impacts of producing and disposing of alternative products and processes, are creating a wealth of information from which designers are innovating environmentally sound products and packaging. The more that the design and manufacturing industry can be encouraged to move towards creating more packaging from recycled materials, more packaging that itself is commonly, easily, and cheaply recycled, and reduced packaging, as well as fewer disposable goods and more reusable ones, the greater will be the positive impact on waste prevention and recycling.

[1] Frahm, Annette, et. al., “Changing Behavior: Insights and Applications”, Local Hazardous Waste Management Program in King County” King County Water Pollution Control Division, Seattle, WA, July, 1996.

[2] "Worldwide cost of living survey from the EIU, London at highest ranking for 20 years", The Economist Intelligence Unit Press Release. http://www.eiu.com/4GfQ663M/pressrelease/WCOLJN98.html

[3] Simmons, D., & Widmar, R. (1989-1990). Participation in household solid waste reduction activities: The need for public education. Journal of Environmental Systems, Vol. 19, pp. 323-330.