The English Plastic Bag Charge Changed Behavior and Increased Support for Other Charges to Reduce Plastic Waste

Thomas, Gregory Owen; Сауткина, Елена; Poortinga, Wouter; Wolstenholme, Emily; Whitmarsh, Lorraine

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00266

Cited by 90 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Some variants exist in the levies across the different UK countries in terms of price, and also the type of bag the charges applied for. England, for example, was the only country where only plastic bags were charged, whilst for the other countries the levy applied to paper bags as well (Thomas et al, 2019). Still, it is possible our results indicate that the short term effects of the levy are much greater than the long term effects.…”

Section: Descriptives Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Psychological and Demographic Predictors of Plastic Bag Consumption in Transaction Data

Lavelle-Hill¹,

Smith²,

Bibby³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supermarket, but little is known about the individuals who are continuing to frequently purchase single-use plastic bags after the levy. In this study, we harnessed over a million loyalty card transaction records from a high-street health and beauty retailer linked to 12,968 questionnaire responses measuring demographics, shopping motivations, and individual differences. We utilised an exploratory machine learning approach to expose the demographic and psychological predictors of frequent plastic bag consumption. In the transaction data we identified 2,326 frequent single-use plastic bag buyers, which we matched randomly to infrequent buyers to create the balanced sub-sample we used for modelling (N=4,652). Frequent bag buyers spent more money in store, were younger, more likely to be male, less frugal, open to new experiences, and displeased with their appearance compared with infrequent bag buyers. Statistical regional differences also occurred. Interestingly, environmental concerns did not predict plastic bag consumption, highlighting the disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes and a specific ecological behaviour measured objectively in the real world.

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Section: Descriptives Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Psychological and Demographic Predictors of Plastic Bag Consumption in Transaction Data

Lavelle-Hill¹,

Smith²,

Bibby³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Some variants exist in the levies across the different UK countries in terms of PSYCHOLOGICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC PREDICTORS OF PLASTIC BAG CONSUMPTION 29 price, and also the type of bag the charges applied for. England, for example, was the only country where only plastic bags were charged, whilst for the other countries the levy applied to paper bags as well (Thomas et al, 2019). Still, it is possible the results indicate that the short term effects of the levy are much greater than the long term effects.…”

Section: Descriptives Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…England's six-month review post-levy showed that the number of single-use plastic bags had dropped by more than 85% to around 500 million in six months (DEFRA, 2018b). People's attitudes towards the levy had also changed (Poortinga, Sautkina, Thomas, & Wolstenholme, 2016;Thomas, Sautkina, Poortinga, Wolstenholme, & Whitmarsh, 2019). A longitudinal survey found that six months after the levy, there was increased support for the charges, and PSYCHOLOGICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC PREDICTORS OF PLASTIC BAG CONSUMPTION 4 improved awareness of the environmental impact of household plastic waste (Poortinga et al, 2016;Thomas et al, 2019).…”

Section: Plastic Bag Chargesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People's attitudes towards the levy had also changed (Poortinga, Sautkina, Thomas, & Wolstenholme, 2016;Thomas, Sautkina, Poortinga, Wolstenholme, & Whitmarsh, 2019). A longitudinal survey found that six months after the levy, there was increased support for the charges, and PSYCHOLOGICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC PREDICTORS OF PLASTIC BAG CONSUMPTION 4 improved awareness of the environmental impact of household plastic waste (Poortinga et al, 2016;Thomas et al, 2019). When the surveyed respondents reduced their plastic bag consumption, it was reported to be for both financial and environmental reasons (Jakovcevic et al, 2014;Poortinga et al, 2016).…”

Section: Plastic Bag Chargesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Psychological and demographic predictors of plastic bag consumption in transaction data

Lavelle-Hill

Goulding

Smith

et al. 2020

Journal of Environmental Psychology

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Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to a supermarket, but little is known about the individuals who are continuing to frequently purchase single-use plastic bags after the levy. In this study, over a million loyalty card transaction records from a high-street health and beauty retailer were harnessed to study 12,968 individuals' bag buying behaviour (analysed using descriptive statistics). Statistical regional differences in plastic bag buying throughout the UK occurred. From the transaction data 2,326 frequent single-use plastic bag buyers were identified and matched randomly to infrequent buyers, creating a balanced sub-sample which was used for predictive modelling (N =4,652). For each individual in the modelling sample, their transaction data was matched to questionnaire responses measuring demographics, shopping motivations, and individual differences. Using this data, an exploratory machine learning approach was utilised to investigate the demographic and psychological predictors of frequent plastic bag consumption. It was found that frequent bag buyers spent more money in store, were younger, more likely to be male, less frugal, open to new experiences, and more displeased with their appearance (compared with infrequent bag buyers). Interestingly, environmental concerns did not predict plastic bag consumption, highlighting the disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes and real world environmental behaviour.

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“…In the 8 pollinator initiatives, the intervention functions of restriction, incentivization, and modeling were rarely coded, and coercion was not mentioned at all. These intervention functions, however, are highly effective for changing proenvironmental behavior (Steg & Vlek 2009;Osbaldiston & Schott 2012;Byerly et al 2018;Nisa et al 2019;Thomas et al 2019). For example, paying for plastic bags (coercion) led to a significant reduction in their use in the United Kingdom (Thomas et al 2019), and government rules and regulations (restriction) that reduce the opportunity to engage in environmentally harmful behaviors are effective when enforced (e.g., restrictions on pesticide use [Cole et al 2011] and biosecurity restrictions on honeybees [IPBES 2016]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing behavior in pollinator conservation policies to combat the implementation gap

Marselle

Turbé²,

Shwartz

et al. 2020

Conservation Biology

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Solutions for conserving biodiversity lie in changing people's behavior. Ambitious international and national conservation policies frequently fail to effectively mitigate biodiversity loss because they rarely apply behavior-change theories. We conducted a gap analysis of conservation behavior-change interventions advocated in national conservation strategies with the Behavior Change Wheel (BCW), a comprehensive framework for systematically characterizing and designing behavior-change interventions. Using pollinator conservation as a case study, we classified the conservation actions listed in national pollinator initiatives in relation to intervention functions and policy categories of the BCW. We included all national-level policy documents from the European Union available in March 2019 that focused on conservation of pollinators (n = 8). A total of 610 pollinator conservation actions were coded using in-depth directed content analysis, resulting in the identification of 787 intervention function and 766 policy category codes. Overall, these initiatives did not employ the entire breadth of behavioral interventions. Intervention functions most frequently identified were education (23%) and environmental restructuring (19%). Least frequently identified intervention functions were incentivization (3%), and restriction (2%) and coercion were completely absent (0%). Importantly, 41% of all pollinator conservation actions failed to identify whose behavior was to be changed. Building on these analyses, we suggest that reasons for the serious implementation gap in national and international conservation policies is founded in insufficient understanding of which behavioral interventions to employ for most beneficial impacts on biodiversity and how to clearly specify the intervention targets. We recommend that policy advisors engage with behavior-change theory to design effective behavior-change interventions that underpin successful conservation policies.

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The English Plastic Bag Charge Changed Behavior and Increased Support for Other Charges to Reduce Plastic Waste

Cited by 90 publications

References 27 publications

Psychological and Demographic Predictors of Plastic Bag Consumption in Transaction Data

Psychological and Demographic Predictors of Plastic Bag Consumption in Transaction Data

Psychological and demographic predictors of plastic bag consumption in transaction data

Addressing behavior in pollinator conservation policies to combat the implementation gap

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