Local people may be surprised to see some of our black bins looking much more decorative than usual. This is the result of the Council being selected for the Local Government Association's Behavioural Insights Programme, which provides funding to encourage people to make better choices. The aim of this 4 week trial is to reduce abandoned rubbish around our communal waste facilities.
The interventions are deliberately designed to move away from our traditional approach to tackling this issue.
There are two aspects to the trial.
Firstly 'Floral' research suggests that if an area looks 'unloved', that gives users the moral licence to not care about how they behave around it. Research suggests that exposure to symbols of natural sights encourages pro-social behaviour.
#Trashtalk - There is significant research that indicates that if we can get users to interact with the bins in a different way, they are likely to behave better around them. So the bins are 'redesigned' to have cheeky messages, to get people's attention.
Cllr Jacqui Wilkinson explains:
"This is an interesting approach in dealing with the misuse of our black bin sites, which can look a mess despite being cleared several times a day."
