China offers a lesson on how to reduce plastic waste when delivering food

The arrival of the food delivery app has left a bad taste in the mouths of governments, environmentalists and others wondering how to deal with mountains of plastic waste. produced in pursuit of culinary convenience.

According to a new study, one answer to the problem lies in a technique that has sparked debate: behavioral nudges.

Examining consumer behavior on a popular food delivery app in China, a team of Asia-based scientists found that messages urging users to give up cutlery from a single use could be quite effective enough to reduce plastic waste in the country by more than 3 million tonnes. per year – the equivalent of 10 Empire State Buildings – if implemented nationwide.

Instead of ordering people to act in a certain way, limiting their options, or using monetary incentives to influence them, nudges seek to influence them.change decisions by changing the way options are presented . Evidence for the effectiveness of nudge as a solution to social problems is mixed, but the soft approach has been shown to be effective in this case, according to the study.

“People generally prefer to be empower rather than simply told what to do,” said Albert Park, a professor of economics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, one of the authors of the study, which appeared in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

The Covid-19 pandemic fueled the popularity of food delivery services around the world, contributing to the increase in plastic waste. The United States produced about 32 million tons of plastic waste in 2018, the latest year for which official statistics are available, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The environmental organization Greenpeace estimates that this figure will reach 51 million tonnes by 2021.

In China, where home delivery is cheap, more than half a billion people use food delivery apps, according to German data platform Statista. China produces more than 80 million tons plastic waste in 2021, about 30% more than in 2018, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

For their study, the researchers looked at data collected from 200,000 randomly selected users in 2019 and 2020 by Ele.me, a Chinese version of DoorDash.

The app’s default interface gives users the option to forego plastic cutlery, but only at checkout and at the bottom of the screen. From 2019 -in response to new government regulations calling for plastic reduction Single-Use: Users in three major cities are presented with a pop-up displaying “no place settings” as the default option, requiring users who want place settings to select the number of sets option. Those who choose to do without plastic cutlery will receive points that can be used to fund the planting of a tree.

The researchers found that users in these cities were 20% less likely to order single-use cutlery with their order during the study period. Do more explicit the possibility of abandoning plastic cutlery it works because it targets users at decision-making time, they said.

“It shows the power platform companies wield over merchant and user behavior,” said Tang Damin, project manager for Beijing-based Greenpeace.

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that owns Ele.me, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, this approach has limitations. Around 11% of users were “push challengers” who they had previously chosen not to use cutlery but then opted for silverware after seeing the new pop-up, suggesting some level of reaction.

Meanwhile, the authors said: it was not possible to know whether the restaurants were consistently compliant with customers’ decision to forego cutlery, leading them to propose a future study that would include a system for users to provide feedback on restaurants’ compliance with cutlery demand.

The study also notes that around 80% of plastic waste generated from food delivery in China comes from packaging, not cutlery.

“It won’t offset all the plastic waste already produced,” Greenpeace’s Tang said of the “uncovered” breach. Instead, he noted, companies should consider reuse systems, in which restaurants and cafeterias provide cutlery, plates and cups to consumers for a fee which is returned upon delivery of the items.

Even if he Push approach fails to tackle biggest source of waste , could still have significant potential impacts. The study found that, applied nationwide, it could save nearly 22 billion single-use cutlery items each year, which equates to a reduction of more than 6% in total municipal plastic waste. .

China has been fighting plastic waste since the 1980s, when train passengers routinely threw away plastic fast food containers. throwing them out the windows, burying the tracks in what has become known as “white pollution”.

In 2020, Beijing introduced new rules banning non-biodegradable plastic bags and require restaurants to reduce single-use plastic by 30% in five years. First implemented in major cities, the rules will be rolled out nationwide by 2025.