Making Campaigning Work!

In my survey of seventy respondents, 62% of people doubted the ability of campaigns to change consumer behaviour.

It's not just about feeling uneasy about it. Data shows that for all the resources poured into the Year of Climate Action 2018, domestic recycling rate climbed by one per cent to hit a twenty-two.

People have complained to me, the government should do more. This begs the question: Can we just stop campaigning and divert our funds somewhere more productive?

I think we should. But campaigning is here to stay. Encouraging people, educating people and motivating them to action remain a crucial component of building an environmentally conscious populace.

Some may scoff at it in favour of taking on tougher measures. People are stubborn and selfish, they say. We need laws to manage the otherwise lawless people.

But forcing people to do what is good for the environment stirs resentment and resistance. Raising awareness about the scale of environmental damage, and softening people's hearts through campaigns will compel one to be eco-friendly. This formula then only becomes effective with the inclusion of environmentally conscious peers in the recipe. Do you see previously unconcerned people now recycling because a poster told them to, or because everyone around them is doing so?

Unfortunately, our campaigns have been quite bland, mainly circulating about the same rhetoric. It's always about the next eco-friendly step that one can do, like "Recycle!" or "Go Zero Waste!", or about our humongous and overwhelming environmental disaster: "In 2019, we generated XXX tonnes of waste, equivalent to XXX Olympic-sized swimming pools!"

Will that motivate people? I doubt so. I know that in my own capacity, I certainly didn't generate an Olympic swimming pool worth of waste, and of course I only bin when necessary. It's not my fault that so many things come in plastic, too.

(Honestly, to the individual Singaporean it doesn't make a difference whether that waste is 10 Olympic sized swimming pools or 100 Olympic sized swimming pools. We just know it's a big problem. Getting bigger every year.)

("Huh, change my habit? The effort of one man cannot make a significant difference. Be pragmatic. Stop idealizing everything. I can't "save the earth", for all my efforts. Neither can you.")

There we go.

Instead of informing people about the scale of the problem, perhaps we can try to look at the same issue through a different angle.