Driving Behaviour Change for Wet Wipe Use and Disposal, 2023

Preventative waste management is at the top of the waste hierarchy set out in the EU Waste Framework and underpins multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, ‘prevention of using’ and ‘re-using’ products involve human behaviour, which makes strategies informed by behavioural science highly relevant for understanding and supporting citizen behavioural change. Studying how pro-health and pro-environmental behaviours support and/or conflict each other would benefit psychologists and economists by facilitating greater engagement with environmental scientists.
In this discipline-hopping collaborative project, an experimental survey study was used to exploit insights and methods from psychology, economics, and environmental science and investigate scenarios in which individuals use wet wipes and how they dispose of them.
Across a range of hypothetical (but typical) use-case scenarios, we find evidence that motivational appeals are most effective in driving support for change at the social or policy level. However, we find that appeals to opportunity (here the opportunity to update their existing knowledge) can encourage individuals to adapt their wet wipe disposal behaviour, and appear more effective than motivating changes in use of wet wipes.