Bottling Habit


Last year, Americans used and discarded about 50 billion plastic water bottles. The recycling rate on those bottles is about 23%, meaning that roughly 38 billion plastic water bottles were dumped into landfills or ended up as general litter.

In the face of this growing problem, Elkay Corporation, a U.S company best-known for drinking fountains, developed the EZH2O fountain, which doubled as a water bottle filling station. This allows people to reuse their own refillable bottles, thus cutting down on waste.

As a savvy company, Elkay saw an opportunity to make money and be a little greener at the same time. The big question their engineers had was, will people actually change their habits and take advantage of the eco-friendly option?

When the engineers finished their filling station design, they decided to add a counter to show consumers how many bottles were being saved with each use. Once the full expense of research and development are factored in, it's not uncommon for prototype models to scale back from the original concept. "At one point, we almost cut the counter from the specification due to cost," Franco Savoni, VP of Product Marketing and Engineering at Elkay told me.

But here's what happened: in college dormitories across the U.S. where the EZH2O was installed, students got really excited about the bottle counters. They could instantly see a tangible result each time they refilled their own bottle—and they could watch those results stack up.

It took almost no effort, saved them a few bucks a bottle, and provided instant gratification that they were doing something good for society and the planet. Watching the bottle counter turn over each time meant they were, in effect, getting gold stars—small, constant, emotionally satisfying dopamine reinforcers.

To up that reward factor, students at both University of Michigan and University of Minnesota even organize contests: which dorm floor can save the most bottles and get that counter the highest? 

As of this writing, Savoni reports that Elkay has delivered "in excess of 100,000 EZH2O units." You can find them at gyms, in airports, and of course, in college campuses.


[Editor's note: it probably bears mentioning that Robb Best is currently employed by Elkay as Senior Advisor for Cognitive Strategy.]


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo...
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a...
Read more

The Top One Quality of True Leaders

Image
“So, what's up with the pile of words?” you ask. This is part of an experiment we conducted earlier this year on how to be the perfect leader. Sooner or later, most of us wind up in a position of some power, whether it’s running a cub scout den or a girl scout troop, heading up a committee at church or your job, or residing over your flamenco dance group or your flamingo lawn ornament club. And when you nobly accepted the challenge of being in charge, your brain released a little shot of cortisol, the stress hormone. In your moment of panic, you made the executive decision to discover the secret to being a good leader. If you were like me, you went down to your local bookstore and perused the aisles looking for books on leadership. After all, you wanted to be the best president the flamingo lawn ornament club had ever known, recognizing a club needs to be more than really swanky pink shirts. In my case, the bookstore anticipated my arrival and had at the ready a slew of...
Read more