How Campaigns Improve Resident Knowledge

Background

To reduce contamination caused by common materials, like paper coffee cups and their plastic lids, as well as increase the amount of recycled materials collected, it's imperative that residents  understand their local rules. It was our goal to teach residents across North American districts proper disposal of coffee cups, a material that is often confusing due to there being many different kinds of cups available in the market and differing rules across different municipalities.

Solution

To teach residents, we enabled a 4-month long educational campaign consisting of Featured Lessons, blog articles, and other modules that incorporated and explained disposal rules specific to their region. These educational modules displayed on both our mobile and web app. We then compared PRO users' engagement and material correct answer rates with a comparative group of equal size comprised of users who only received quiz questions. We compared the data between the two groups:

• Group 1 included all 88,859 residents belonging to PRO districts who would be served educational content
• Group 2 included 88,990 residents randomly selected from Essentials districts in various geographical regions who would not be served education content Results Residents who were part of the PRO campaign group engaged with more than ten times the amount of coffee cup-related content than residents of Essentials districts and achieved a higher correct answer rate when asked about their local disposal rules.

The Campaign group's Correct Answer Rate was 47.54% higher when quizzed about disposal rules for paper coffee cups and by 51.72% when quizzed about plastic coffee cup lids, a staggering difference in their understanding of this problem material.

Key Takeaway

Presenting residents with dedicated educational content on problem materials helps improve recycling knowledge with the potential to change recycling behaviours.