A Chinese study has found that plastic waste can be cut significantly by encouraging food delivery customers to skip asking for disposable forks, spoons, and chopsticks. By analyzing detailed customer-level data, researchers discovered that using “green nudges” could up the share of no-cutlery orders by 648%.
The study, conducted from 2019 to 2020, was a collaboration between the Asian Development Bank and Chinese multinational technology company Alibaba. Researchers looked into Alibaba’s online food-ordering platform Eleme, China’s second-largest food delivery company with more than 753 million users in 2022.
In 2019, the delivery app made “no cutlery” the default option for users in its checkout window. This was put in place after Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin introduced regulations that banned food delivery companies from providing single-use cutlery unless explicitly requested.
Eleme introduced “green points” to incentivize customers, which were awarded to those who opted out of choosing cutlery. With enough points, these can be redeemed in exchange for planting a real tree under the consumer’s name in a desert area in China.
Results show that this tremendously reduced global plastic waste without affecting Alibaba’s business performance.
If applied to all of China, it could save more than 21.75 billion sets of single-use cutlery annually, equivalent to preventing around 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste and preserving 5.44 million trees.
Reducing plastic waste on a global scale
The demand for food delivery has grown exponentially over the last decade, creating a more convenient system for consumers everywhere.
However, it has also generated an increase in disposable, single-use cutlery on a global scale. As a result, more than 400 million metric tons of plastic waste was produced in 2021. Researchers predict that the world’s plastic waste growth will outpace the efforts to reduce plastic waste for decades to come.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of single-use plastic. According to a June report by the Asian Development Bank, the country became responsible for around one-third of the world’s plastic as of 2021. Policymakers are aiming to cut down single-use plastics in food deliveries by 30% by 2025.
Researchers say that implementing “green nudges” could be overwhelmingly effective in reaching this goal in a cost-effective manner.
“Our study provides compelling evidence that nudges can be a powerful tool for changing behaviors,” the researchers said. “It also suggests that private sector and platform companies can provide highly cost-effective solutions to promote prosocial behaviors among their customers.
“In this study, the costs of implementing the green nudges were almost negligible (i.e., several hours of work to redesign the user interface), yet the aggregated environmental benefits were tremendous. We thus recommend that other online food-delivery platforms, such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, try similar green nudges to reduce global plastic waste.”
Comments 1