Creating Ownership for Campus
One of the main issues with littering on campus is stemmed from people not taking any kind of ownership for it. This allows students and faculty alike to excuse their littering as something that is no longer their problem. When students are able to excuse the area as somewhere unimportant to them it makes it easier for them to walk away from their littering habits and continue them.
There is no clear solution to this problem but one of the most effective types of campaigns to this lack of ownership is to try and create a connection between a person’s home, or local area and their campus. In 2008, the City of Belfast ran an ad campaign with the slogan “So why do you do it here?” in which they targeted a certain type of litter yielded positive results (Lyndhurst 54). This campaign was effective due to Belfast not addressing litter as an issue as a whole but the behavioural and social aspects behind littering. Consequences and Reinforcements |
It's your campus, keep it clean
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Consequences for littering can be a very effective if applied correctly. It is effective in deterring people as a whole both on and off campus. “International evidence suggests that fines or other punishments such as litter picking can be a significant enough threat to prevent people from littering” (Lyndhurst 30) Research in the US showed that litter picking as a form of community service was a strong deterrent due to the embarrassment involved. (Lyndhurst 31) It is shown that applying full fines for littering is not the most effective form of prevention as actually applying them is difficult but having the fines in place does cause people to think twice before they litter.
Antecedents
Antecedent’s acts as the driving stimulus’s to the adoption of behaviours, utilizing habitual cues in diverse methods (Waghorn-Lees pg.4). The use of antecedents to eliminate litter would revolve around anti-litter signs, correctional behavioural prompts, and clean campus campaigns. Applying the use of antecedent catalysts inflates change in the social cues of anti-littering norms, and acts as guides for appropriate environmental behaviour (Ojedokun pg.33). When antecedents begin to be taken advantage of, people will be more likely to take actions in prevention of littering on campus and furthermore develop the needed behavioural tendencies for a cleaner, litter-free campus (Ojedokun pg.33).
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