The Marin Joint Powers Authority (JPA) has an ambitious goal—make Marin a zero waste zone by 2025 and literally eliminate waste altogether. For a goal like this, messaging alone wouldn't be enough. We needed to incite behavioral change. We created an online hub full of simple challenges to show people what they could do to realize the goal themselves.

To make people concious of the things they throw away we focused 10 challenges on everyday items—paper coffee cups, plastic bags, paper towels, etc. We found that it was these 'small' things that people didn't realize added up to such a huge amount of trash; taking a challenge opened them to become more concious of their waste as a whole.

Users get their communities to join by sharing their pledge through social media—but only after uploding a picture of some latte-art or a baby with sunglasses on.


Through online tools, opt-in text message reminders, email encouragement, tips and resources, we created a support structure to help people gradually make small, simple choices every day that change their wasteful habits into more sustainable ones.

Most environmental campaigns forget about the biggest motivator of all—feedback. At the end of each challenge, we post community progress reports. Residents could view the most active communities, watch how their efforts are paying off, and see how much trash is being diverted daily.

Challenges are fun—so are illustrations, but it was a challenge to illustrate this whole campaign.

Process

Zero waste, as a concept, is hard to imagine—not throwing things away seems almost impossible; putting a deadline of 2025 on it really felt daunting. I myself had doubts about the reality of this goal. The client wanted the typical, some Tv spots, online banners, print and out of home advertising, etc. I felt though, that, for a task like this messaging alone wouldn't be the answer.
I conducted interviews with trash haulers and residents to find out how much they understood the zero waste goal. Asking simple questions like “How often do you forget to take the trash bins out for pick up?” gave me an idea of how important it was to residents to make sure their trash bin is emptied and ready to be refilled.
As an experiment to see how much stuff I personally was throwing out. I decided to keep a trash diary. Even after only a few days of photographing everything I threw away I could see how it all added up.
Only when I realized my individual contribution could I really imagine the scale of the problem, and the need for a zero-waste initiative.
When sorting through all that I’d heard and learned, It all started to come together; telling people to stop throwing things away wouldn’t be as effective as teaching people how to throw less things away.
I began to design a teaching tool that showed Marin residents how to begin living a zerowaste lifestyle through small but effective challenges (e.g: bringing a resuable travel mug the cafe for your morning coffee, using a cloth trashcan liner for non organic waste, composting, etc.

It was important that the overall user journey was simple and easy to navigate. I set up the challenge tracks very linearly without many tangents that could take the user out of the experience and lose track of their goal. Each challenge was a month long, making it easy to keep users engaged with minimal nudging from the system.