Matter Gretener Lesch: Waste Bucket Trophy

How do you sustainably reduce littering? It's simple: you make it clear to children and young people that the next litter bin is never far away. This is exactly the idea behind the Litter Bin Trophy, which the Nudge agency Matter Gretener Lesch developed for the municipality of Thalwil. It took place in the run-up to the national Clean-Up Day on 12/13 September 2014 and invited the 6th classes of Thalwil's primary school buildings to find as many as possible of the litter bins set up on the territory of the municipality of Thalwil and marked with an individual code. The 6th grade that collected the most codes and posted them on the website Trophy.thalwil-littering.ch entered won an excursion.

The behavioral economic background for the successfully implemented competition is provided by the fact that littering is often justified by the fact that there was just no litter bin nearby. By mentally anchoring the omnipresence of litter bins, this excusing argument is invalidated and awareness of the violation of the social norms of "cleanliness" and "order" is restored - especially at events with large crowds, where the littering problem is particularly pronounced.

Thalwil local councillor Jan Rauch, divisional head of infrastructure: "We are convinced that by holding the litter bin trophy we have laid the foundations in a playful way for the change in behavior we want to see."

The action is part of the unusual initiative "Contract for a Clean Thalwil", for whose communication measures Matter Gretener Lesch has been responsible since 2013. Contrary to the strategy of fines and bans usually chosen by city and municipal governments to mitigate the littering problem, the Zurich lakeside community of Thalwil opted for a different approach. It sought talks with committed citizens and, together with them, developed an unusual idea: the "Contract for a Clean Thalwil". In concrete terms, everyone signs a contract pledging to stop throwing litter on the ground.

Responsible at the municipality of Thalwil: Gion Hagmann (Head of DLZ Infrastructure), Franziska Kummer (DLZ Infrastructure). Responsible at Matter Gretener Lesch: Marcus Gretener, Ulrich Stauffacher (consulting), Laura Haas (graphics); programming: Digitale Offensive.