Behavior Change Campaign for Strategic Urban Composting

Abstract

Interest in urban composting has been gradually increasing, as cities such as San Francisco lead the way and others follow its cue (Hill, 2017; “How Cities Compost Mountains of Food Waste,” 2013). Increasing interest is occurring outside of the U.S., as well, including in countries such as Canada and Singapore (Wee, 2017). Part of the increased interest may be due to interest urban agriculture (Alejandra Cancino 2014). Engaging the many citizens who aren’t involved in urban farming or gardening, however, can pose a challenge, as the practice has only recently started to gain visibility in the eye of the general public, despite its existence since centuries ago (Lenkiewicz 2017). We delve further into the challenges of citizen engagement in this report, as well. Using behavior change campaigns informed by psychology has made research from the field more accessible and applicable, such as when used within a community-based social marketing framework, and has been shown to be valuable when supporting development of sustainable behaviors (McKenzie-Mohr 2000). Collaborating with community-based organizations can be an ideal place to start when developing a behavior change strategy, especially as doing so allows researchers to work in a way that appreciates the value of participatory action research and its emphasis on seeking to understand individuals’ context before working toward change (MacDonald 2012). As such, by partnering with a community-based organization such as Hudson River Park (HRP) (Community Partnerships | Hudson River...), we have been given a superb chance to learn about the Park, the communities it serves, and the opportunity to affect pro-environmental behavior change in a way that supports the Park and its flourishing. As such, the ideas in this report have been developed not only through the formal stages of our research, but also through the ideas that came out of informal conversations during our two site visits and numerous conference calls. We have laid out the remainder of this report as follows: the Executive Summary provides a high-level description of our project and results while the Project Overview gives more context for this research project. Additionally, the Executive Summary and Project Overview were written largely with and for HRP. Next, the Literature Review, Exploratory Interviews, and Community Survey sections detail our results. Finally, we end with our Recommendations and Conclusion. The sections from the Executive Summary to the Recommendations were previously submitted to HRP and have all been modified, refined, and/or updated to various extents since the original submission of our report to HRP in February 2018 (Appendix - Report for Hudson River Park, February 2018).