ReLondon’s CEO, Wayne Hubbard, along with their head of communications and behaviour change, Ali Moore, argue that it’s time to channel investment into behaviour change, which will support people’s move towards more zero-waste lifestyles.
Powerful marketing uses psychological insights and behavioural science – and a huge stack of cash – to keep us consuming materials and products at the expense of living within safe planetary boundaries.
Earlier this year, The Guardian covered a rather interesting story that seemed to get little attention from policymakers or other media outlets: new interdisciplinary research from the Merz Institute implied that it doesn’t matter how many wind or solar farms we build to tackle the symptoms of climate breakdown because the underlying cause of the crisis is consumption.
Fuelled by global businesses’ powerful marketing, which uses psychological insights and behavioural science to keep us consuming, as well as population growth which has cancelled out much of the progress we’ve made as a planet to tackle the climate emergency, the “crisis of human behaviour” is described by one of the report’s authors as “driving us to extinction”.
For those of us working to accelerate our transition to a more circular economy, this is not exactly news. We’re painfully aware of the fact that only 55% of damaging greenhouse gas emissions can be abated through the energy and transport transition and that the remaining 45% are driven by consumption – of food, products and materials.
The latest Circularity Gap Report shows that global circularity has declined steadily from 9.1% in 2018 to 7.2% in 2023 – while shockingly, the total amount of materials consumed by the global economy in the past six years alone is almost as much as we consumed during the whole of the 20th century. (If you’re interested, that’s over half a trillion tonnes of stuff.)
So why then do we hear so little about tackling consumption from policy makers or environmental change-makers closer to home?
How do we reduce consumption?
The answer we hear so often refers to how palatable, or otherwise, a message of “stop consuming so much stuff” might be to the public. It feels like we’re telling people how to live their lives and what choices to make, and in Britain, in particular, that’s culturally a hard sell.
But at ReLondon we believe that circular solutions aren’t just better for the planet, they’re often better than the linear alternatives, for our pockets, our health, our well-being and more.
What about if, rather than just “preaching”, we play with the choices available? We could improve access to sustainable stuff and make it attractive by focusing on personal benefits, such as cost and health.
At ReLondon, our approach is to use a variety of interventions, pilots, and campaign styles, all of which aim to improve people’s knowledge of these better options, increase their motivation to choose them, and make it really easy to do the “right thing”.
From neighbourhood pilots in collaboration with boroughs to helping high street businesses through funding and advisory support as they implement innovative, waste-busting services, we influence choice architecture across London to support more circular, low-waste lifestyles and kickstart that transition to a low-carbon circular economy.
One of the higher-profile ways we do that is through our award-winning communications campaigns, which engage citizens with ways of wasting less and reusing, repairing, sharing, renting and recycling more.
We still find ourselves often dealing with stakeholder concern that we are ‘telling people how to live their lives’.
But despite a fairly broad consensus around the value of these kinds of lifestyle shifts, we still find ourselves often dealing with stakeholder concern that we are “telling people how to live their lives”.
Yet businesses, retailers and brands in particular, are constantly telling us what to buy, how to eat, where to spend our money and why their products are essential to our sense of self, well-being and social acceptance… and we don’t seem to mind that.
So the power of messaging works. It works, as the Merz Institute piece points out, to keep us consuming in the face of both a cost-of-living crisis and powerful evidence that we’re using up the planet’s finite resources at an unsustainable rate.
Earth Overshoot Day – the day on which we have used up all the biological resources that the planet can regenerate or renew during the entire year – will be several weeks earlier this year than it was in 2023 when it fell on 2 August.
The extraction, production, use, and disposal of all those resources creates dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon and methane.
How then can we use the power of marketing to tackle this and redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms? How can we get on the front foot and not be seen to be telling people what to do as we help citizens to buy less, repair more, eat less meat, reuse and share things?
The secret to successful communications
Here at ReLondon we use behavioural science and deep insights to identify the most powerful levers we can find to change consumption behaviours, and then work with talented creative and media agencies to design campaigns – including London Repair Week, Love Not Landfill and Eat like a Londoner – which we hope will stand up against those used by retailers and brands to grow their businesses.
But compared to those businesses, the environmental sector’s budgets are tiny, so our reach is limited. As we saw climate concerns being pushed down the agenda during a busy election year, recent coverage of the casual use of private jets for short journeys also shows that few genuinely influential celebrities are ready to step up to the plate.
The different players needed to make fast, impactful change are many, and, like most existential challenges, it’s complex – but the need has never been greater for funders, policymakers and businesses to help us address the behavioural challenge.
The new government has said that a zero waste economy is a priority area for action, which is an encouraging step forward.
However, if we’re to create a circular economy in which materials and resources are kept in use for as long as possible, at their highest possible value, we need funders of every kind including philanthropists, trusts and foundations as well as progressive corporates and government at every level to invest in behaviour change.
Tackling how we consume stuff from a behavioural perspective suffers from a serious lack of funding, and competes on a less than even playing field with the big global marketers.
Without more sophisticated and far-reaching marketing efforts which can genuinely stand up against the big corporate advertisers – without climate funders putting their money where their mouth is and investing in the planet – you can expect to hear much more from organisations like Merz about the crises in consumption and behaviour over the coming years.
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