River Canoe Club — VanessaBu

River Canoe Club: Cooks River Litter Prevention Framework

The Brief:

Over the past few years, the River Canoe Club has worked with a number of local stakeholders to organise clean-up events along the Cooks River. They developed a comprehensive litter prevention strategy so that in 2025 we have 50% less litter in the Cooks Catchment area. The big question for RCC in the implementation of their litter prevention strategy is what comes next in the framework. While they are good at organising river clean-ups to remove the litter, they want to investigate how they can prevent it from going there in the first place? How can they build community engagement and create a sense of excitement around it to create long-lasting change?

Our Solution:

We recognise that there are many ways we can tackle this project, requiring a holistic approach. We developed a framework that illustrates the elements of community engagement in litter prevention. We gave specific suggestions on how to ensure people are aware and informed and how they can prioritise and deliver these initiatives.

Team:
3 UX Designers

Tools:
Pen & Paper
Miro
Figma

Duration:
3-week team design sprint

Deliverables:
Slide deck
Other resources

Methods:
Research
Surveys
Journey mapping
Archetype development
Ideation
Sketching
Problem framing

International Campaigns

Overall we looked into 17 campaigns and they fell into four different types of categories. They focus on community pride, emotional messaging, easy actions and social pressure.

We found that most campaigns motivate people through pride and love for the local community.

In the survey we conducted, we received 40 responses. We found that most of our participants were not aware if the council or community within that area held any litter prevention initiatives.

Half of the participants were not doing anything about the litter in their neighbourhood, however, they passionately voiced their concerns on how litter affects the environment, wildlife and the overall hygiene within the community.

From our research, we designed a framework that illustrates the elements for community engagement in litter prevention.
We found that awareness, motivation and triggers are all key components that drive education and encourage long term change.

Motivation

Emotional Engagement

Emotional engagement is a powerful tool that helps people to decide with their hearts and is proven to have more influence than the mind.

Out of 1,400 successful advertising campaigns, emotional content performed twice as well as rational content.

Personal Experience

Personal experience serves as a basis for reflection. We can develop ideas and opinions from reflections that can motivate us to take action.

It’s a unique way of changing behaviour as it can influence seasoned individuals with prior experience. Though we found that it can decay over time, personal experience can motivate long-term behaviour.

Personal Benefit

For personal benefit, sometimes we are motivated by egoistic reasons and how things will benefit us. This can inspire people to push for better social and economic outcomes.

Local Closeness

People feel more concerned by issues that feel close to home. This can cause people to feel discomfort or upset as it touches upon sensitive or personal matters. Local closeness brings intimacy and inclusiveness, throughout a community.

Awareness

How might people become aware?

Each of these methods have different levels of engagement. But it’s fair to say that **social media** will have the highest visibility with relative ease and minimal expense. We also believe that the website will become crucial in navigating your audience to stay informed and take action.

In Australia, Facebook and YouTube has the highest usage, followed by Instagram. Different social media platforms attract different age groups, so choosing the correct platform may be more beneficial for particular campaigns. Because LinkedIn is growing, it can be a great place to target professionals and businesses.

We created some examples of social media posts. These examples include elements of building pride, evoking emotions and linking a sense of local closeness together with slogan and call to action.

Basic website sketches and information architecture.

The model suggests that three elements must converge at the same time for a behaviour to occur, which is motivation, ability, and prompt.

This model also suggests that changes are made by starting with small and easy steps. According to our research, we found out everyone has the ability to pick up litter, but they don’t have enough motivation and triggers, so their behaviour doesn’t change.

Triggers

What kind of triggers will help promote long term behavioural change?

To create long term behaviour change in the community - we must start small and focus on individuals. In the next few slides, we will explore proactive and reactive ways that you can approach this. We wanted to look at some proactive ways of litter prevention because it targets the root of the problem.

The first example is about reducing the use of packaging by highlighting the difference between individual and bulk packaging, and the price difference, it shows the benefit to customers, while reducing packaging. For example, instead of having 14 individual bags of chips, buying 1 large pack will create less packaging. We can use this to encourage people to buy just 1 bag and use containers instead.

Ideally, these types of messages can be coupled with triggers at the supermarkets to remind people. This might include having the message on shopping cart, basket, green bags and aisle signage where snacks are located. Also, if we want to promote less single use plastic bags, we can encourage supermarkets to sell mesh bags near the veggie section as a trigger.

Messaging on bins, may also help reduce overfilling and ensure people are taking bins out on the correct night. Reminder messages from the council or simply showing how to compact your recycling will help in making sure people are doing the right thing on an individual level. These are the trigger for the proactive level, but what about the trigger for the reactive level? I will pass it to Nobuto to talk about it.

What Now?

This we found to be a very large and complex question, one we believe requires a holistic approach. From our campaign and human behaviour research, we have found 3 core similarities:
Get your story out there
Make it easy to get involved
Create triggers or reminders So where do we start? What is the best initiative?

We realised successful initiatives can take on many forms - there is no one size fits all approach. Yokohama in Japan achieved 43% reduction in garbage waste with place-based education. Singapore achieved a clean city by strict urban laws and heavy fines. Cities around the world are making polluted waterways into swimming hotspots to reconnect people with rivers and canals. What is the right solution for the Cooks River and the communities surrounding it? Perhaps the first step is a free walking or boat tour that highlights native wildlife and plants and how litter affects them. Maybe it’s a sponsored bbq’s or a small gathering at the river to get the conversation started.

At the end of the day, you won’t know what works best, without trying them first.
For this reason, we want to introduce the SCRUM process.

Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together. It’s widely used in software development but it’s becoming more common in other industries like financial services, product development, construction etc. We can apply this to test initiatives for the Cooks River. If you are able to run 1 small campaign every month, you’ll be able to measure 12 different initiatives in a year and compare the success. Depending on how successful a campaign is, you may find yourself re-prioritising your list and changing direction quickly depending on the community’s reaction.

Prioritise that list
Make a plan for the first initiative
Run that campaign on a small scale in a hotspot area
Measure the success

What did I learn?
This project was by far the most challenging for me. Our ideas didn’t seem to match what the client wanted and our suggestions became a process of elimination. There were a lot of times when we would come up with an idea and then go back to the drawing board. We were unsure if we were going to come up with a digital product, a physical product or a framework/strategy they could use. We decided that people needed the education to use whatever digital/physical product created in the future. I learnt from this project that there is sometimes no ‘right’ way to approach a problem and solutions will not come in a linear fashion. I learnt that a project like this does not a have ‘magical pill’ and requires time, patience and lots of testing to see what works.