The behaviour of smokers in disposing of cigarette butts is complex. Cigarette butts, unlike other consumable items, are more likely to end up as litter than in a bin. Beliefs about disposing of cigarette butts include that they will quickly decompose and that putting butts in bins leads them to catch fire, with common behaviour being to flick, toss or grind cigarette butts. Smokers do not simply fall into stereotypical categories of being either ‘someone who litters’ or ‘someone who doesn’t’, and it seems many smokers may in fact not have a set repertoire of behaviours and habits for disposing of used butts. Smokers may even dispose of their butt in different ways depending on the situation in which they find themselves.
|
The case of Henry
Henry has worked with the same company in Sydney for many years and has lots of friends at work. He smokes about 15 cigarettes a day, which are mostly consumed in the outdoors smoking/break area. At home when he smokes, he is careful to do so outside away from windows and the children. He is meticulous about extinguishing the used butt, putting it into an ashtray so his backyard stays spotless. Henry is a keen environmentalist, who has installed solar panels, a solar hot water service and recycles every fortnight.
Often on work breaks he has a coffee and after watching the ABC’s War on Waste series he has taken to bringing his own reusable ‘keep cup’ to work. To him, the reusable cup means he is helping ‘save the world’ by actively reducing waste, and as a bonus he gets a discount from his favourite cafe.
During winter he and his colleagues hide from the wind near a planter box to drink coffee, smoke and talk. At the end of their break they throw their cigarettes into the mulch in the garden bed or ‘drop and stomp the butt’ on the street to ensure it is extinguished before going back to work. Henry seems unaware of the environmental damage that results from his disposal actions which perversely seem in complete contrast to his perception of being environmentally responsible. Henry has been known to walk 30 metres to find a butt bin when he smokes at his daughter’s football game while at the beach he has also been seen to bury his cigarette butt in the sand.
|
Probably the only thing that is constant in understanding cigarette butt disposal behaviour – littering and bin use – is that it is subject to change. Often when agencies seek to stop smokers littering they adopt a static view about disposal behaviour and assume logically that educating smokers would lead to more environmentally responsible behaviour. The evidence shows that when such approaches succeed in the short term, their benefits are rarely sustained. Trying to persuade or exhort people to change their beliefs can be very challenging.
Influences of littering behaviour
Australian psychologists have broadened the foundations for attempting to influence disposal actions by using a detailed observational approach and behavioural assessment techniques. To support sustainable outcomes from interventions behavioural insights are combined with community engagement strategies within frameworks for modifying aspects of the external and social environment.
Managing the complexity of butt-disposal behaviour involves helping clients to think of this behaviour as being the outcome of four different groups of factors.
- ‘Care of place’ factors that influence people’s perception of how ‘cared for’ a place looks.
- Responsibility factors that influence people’s sense of responsibility in looking after a place.
- Penalties and rewards that influence disposal behaviour motivation.
- Individual factors that involve people’s personal beliefs, views, habits and preferences.
|
As psychologists we’ve separated these factors into four groups to make them easier to describe. In reality, they don’t fit into such neat categories. Indeed using such discrete categories can make it challenging to work with clients familiar with linear approaches to understanding behaviour. Often a project scope is determined by clients with a desire to find neat sequences of factors to direct change. Our role involves helping clients understand that these factors don’t operate separately, connect like dominoes or form tiny pieces of an intricate two-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Successful consultation has clients engaged as equals committed to careful, well-structured approaches based on insights and practical applications from careful behavioural research to demonstrate how to influence habitual cigarette butt littering actions.
Partnerships, evidence and great interventions
The NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) leads a partnership process guided by social scientists collaborating with a range of stakeholders to find ways to influence smokers’ disposal behaviour. It has adopted a long-term perspective using rigorous empirical methods to investigate relationships between smokers thinking, perceptions, feelings and disposal behaviour. This work has taken account of the effects of the built environment, behaviour change models, identification and removal of barriers to action and insights into smokers’motivation, risk perception and ability to adapt their disposal behaviour.
“Australian psychologists have broadened the foundations for attempting to influence disposal actions by using a detailed observational approach and behavioural assessment techniques”
The process taken involved a range of activities:
- Desktop review of knowledge about what influences smoker’s disposal acts.
- Adoption of a place-based model using behavioural assessment tools adapted for use by community members.
- Evidence-based approach to supporting change that built on measurable local successes and accurately identified challenges.
- Validation of a community-based assessment tool (the Butt Litter Check) for measuring the factors influencing disposal actions.
- Qualitative research with smokers combined with observations of behavioural chaining to understand disposal of cigarette butts.
- Using insights to develop four intervention strategies to influence and support appropriate butt disposal.
- Collaboration with councils and the community to find practical ways of operationalising the four groups of factors underlying the interventions to get smokers to ‘bin their butts’.
- Engaging stakeholders to implement a quasi-experimental repeated measures design to test the effectiveness of interventions. Considerable time was invested in building acceptance of the design including measuring impacts of changes on disposal behaviour, use of control comparison areas, extended follow up and independent statistical analysis.
- Coordination of stakeholders throughout the evaluation trials of the four interventions to maintain consistency and ensure comparability of outcomes.
- Identifying what works and sharing results with key stakeholders to extend reach through a broader program for use across the state.
All four intervention strategies built on the well-researched foundation that ‘clean equals clean,’ and access to butt bins is vital for smokers to correctly dispose of their butts. When smokers congregate in very neat and clean smoking areas, they are more likely to take care about where they put their ash between puffs and often make sure to use the butt bin. In messier smoking areas though, smokers seem less concerned about standards and if there are lots of butts lying around less fussed about where to dispose of their butt.
Strategic testing
Interventions were tested by 16 councils using 40 separate trials of interventions which all built on the foundations of clean smoking areas with appropriate BINfrastructure (butt bins)
Each of the four strategies focused on modifying specific factors known to influence smoker disposal behaviour with success measured by demonstrating actual and sustained reductions in littering and increased use of bins.
The four strategies were:
- Pride and ownership – creating an environment where smokers feel welcome or at least less ostracised with their disposal needs catered for in areas where a sense of pride or ownership can build a commitment to do the right thing by binning their butts. Responding to requests to improve the amenity and cleanliness of smoking areas demonstrates commitment to a cleaner environment.
- Enforcement – raising the risk attached to littering by increasing awareness of fines, visibility of enforcement officers and providing an incentive not to litter based on opportunity cost of receiving a penalty. By penalising someone for littering, you’re hoping that they’re less likely to do it in the future. The mere threat of a penalty will be enough to deter people from littering in the first place. In fact you can think of penalty programs as a formal set of signals that exists to reinforce the strong existing social norm not to litter.
- Pathways – creating an optimum environment to facilitate smokers to correctly dispose of their butts. Creating pathways to BINfrastructure makes bins more visually prominent (sometime using signs and behavioural cues), easy to find, clean, accessible and easy to use is the cornerstone of using physical features of a smoking area to mediate the social norm for using bins.
- Positive social norming – establishing the social norm for smokers to do the right thing with their butts, calling on smokers to act responsibly and then reinforcing the positive feeling smokers get from disposing correctly. Smokers look to others to know what values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour are socially acceptable or unacceptable. Surveys of smokers in public places show strong beliefs in it being important not to litter butts and to keep places clean, yet they litter butts anyway. By paying attention to smokers using bins and working toward the goal of butt litter free smoking areas we signal to smokers what other smokers are doing which becomes a strong guide for what is expected.
|
Changing habits
Our studies of cigarette littering behaviour show that where special attention has been paid to providing well-located butt disposal options in clean, well-maintained areas, butt-littering rates can be halved. The combined outcome from these trials show an almost doubling of bin use and all four strategies showed positive outcomes with significant reductions in butt littering.
One of the major contributions psychologists have to this type of project is in the interpretation of findings and distilling practical implications from the achievements.
|
The case of Henry continued…
In recent times Henry has been feeling better about his smoking during work breaks, which were taken in a trial site where all four strategies were implemented. He had noticed the butt bins were kept clean as though they were new, he saw his friends using them and signs on the ground where he used to drop his butt pointing toward the BINfrastructure. One smoker in the area was fined for littering his butt and Henry’s group all discussed that they were never likely to be fined because they always use the bin and were committed to keeping their area clean.
|
Leadership and behaviour change
Smokers vary in terms of who they consider to be responsible for keeping a public smoking area clean. Their beliefs exist along a continuum where at one end of the scale, someone else (council) is seen as responsible and at the other, only the smokers who use the place should be responsible. Smokers are seen as accountable for littering but it’s the council’s responsibility to prevent it and when it occurs to clean it up. Both parties have a shared responsibility that exists as the social compact, an unstated psychological agreement that ‘if you do your bit I’ll do mine’. When the social compact is working well, there’s a mutual understanding and respect for the role we all play in promoting common interests in butt litter free smoking areas. In these places, the community plays its part by not littering and councils work hard to use the four strategies to prevent littering and maintain the area, cleaning up and making the place look welcoming and smoker friendly.
Leadership from public-space managers is crucial in this process, influencing disposal behaviour by demonstrating their commitment to the reciprocity inherent in the social compact and maintaining this unwritten but powerful psychological agreement.
Psychologists can help public-space managers to look carefully at places where smokers congregate, and discover as much as they can about how people interact with these spaces and to see all these factors at work. While we’re trying to improve our understanding of what goes on in people’s heads, it’s probably more practical to focus on contributing to the big-ticket items that clients can do something about – care of place factors, responsibility factors, and penalties and rewards.
The author can be contacted at [email protected]
- This work does not endorse smoking as an activity but does continue 25 years of work with agencies facilitating smokers to responsibly dispose of butts. The author acknowledges Ms Karen Spehr’s contribution to litter prevention and environmental protection.