Is AI A-OK? Exploring Artificial Intelligence and Environmental Outreach

Nancy Roberts
fotor generated image of tree, cloud, water and person
This image – generated at Fotor.com – supposedly illustrates the use of AI for environmental behavior change campaigns…!

Everywhere we look these days, we see both excitement and warnings around the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution. How will the use of artificial intelligence impact our outreach? Will it make it easy to select the best way to communicate about environmental behavior change? Will it put environmental behavior change agencies out of business? ARGH.

While we don’t think we’ll be out of a job any time soon, we all know that change is the only certainty and that we will all need to adapt to this new ‘entity’. Let’s look at the current state of AI with a couple of examples from Google’s Bard chatbot:

I asked Bard:

“Write a Facebook post that will incorporate food waste messaging and Livermore’s Binny.”

Bard responded:

Sure, here is a Facebook post that incorporates food waste messaging and Livermore’s Binny:

Headline: Livermore’s Binny is Helping to Fight Food Waste

Body:

Did you know that one-third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted every year? That’s enough food to feed 2 billion people!

Food waste is a major environmental problem. It contributes to climate change, water pollution, and deforestation. It also wastes resources that could be used to feed people.

Livermore’s Binny is helping to fight food waste. They donate food to local food banks and soup kitchens. They also compost food scraps, which helps to reduce methane emissions.

If you’re looking for ways to reduce food waste, there are a few things you can do:

    • Plan your meals ahead of time so you don’t buy more food than you need.
    • Cook only what you need and save leftovers for later.
    • Donate food to local food banks or soup kitchens.
    • Compost food scraps.

By taking these steps, you can help to reduce food waste and make a difference in the world.

Call to action:

To learn more about how you can help fight food waste, visit Binny’s website or follow them on social media.

While the information is not totally incorrect, it seems as if Bard could not distinguish a Facebook post from a 185-word blog post. Despite having instant access to the entire Internet, Bard did not know that Binny is a mascot for Livermore Recycles, representing the Organics Cart; Binny himself does not “donate food to local food banks and soup kitchens.” While this post draft gives some ideas, it certainly requires human intervention.

I tried to push the AI to make decisions about which content to include in a short format, asking:

“Please write a tweet with the most important action an individual can take to combat the climate crisis.”

Bard’s response was very big-picture – for whatever reason, it did not focus on recycling or reducing individual carbon footprint, but on political action:

The most important action an individual can take to combat the climate crisis is to vote for climate-friendly candidates. Vote in every election, from local to national, and let your elected officials know that climate action is a top priority for you. #ClimateAction

So far, these responses are reasonable but not earth-shattering. Can AI provide the spark that really grabs attention? I tried to elicit some more creativity from Bard, asking:

“Please write a limerick about sorting waste at home.”

Bard responded with:

There was a young lady named Sue
Who sorted her waste into two.
She said, “I’m a bit green,
But I’m doing my scene
By recycling and composting too!”

Well, Bard,  I think “doing my scene” is a bit weak, but this has a spark of life in it.

Finally, selfishly, I asked Bard, “When will AI replace the need for environmental outreach professionals?”

Part of Bard’s reply was appealing:

Here are some ways that AI can be used to support environmental outreach professionals:

    • Create engaging and informative content:AI can be used to generate content that is tailored to the needs of different audiences. For example, AI can be used to create infographics, videos, and articles that are both informative and engaging.
    • Track the effectiveness of outreach efforts:AI can be used to track the effectiveness of outreach efforts by measuring things like website traffic, social media engagement, and donations. This data can be used to improve future outreach efforts.
    • Connect with people who might not otherwise be reached:AI can be used to connect with people who might not otherwise be reached by environmental outreach efforts. For example, AI can be used to create chatbots that can answer questions about environmental issues or to create personalized email campaigns.

Some interesting promises here that we will explore further. But, we also like Bard’s conclusion:

Overall, AI is a powerful tool that can be used to support environmental outreach professionals. However, it is important to remember that AI cannot replace the human touch. Environmental outreach professionals are still essential for building relationships with people and communities, and for creating lasting change.

Amen!

P.S. Bard does not yet create images, but I asked Fotor.com to “Create an image for a blog post about the use of AI for environmental behavior change campaigns.” The result (see above) is, well, interesting!

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The Role of Art in Making Change

Stefanie Pruegel

Angela Davis at Oakland Museum graphicBig, complex environmental issues like climate change can easily overwhelm and lead to resignation and denial, instead of creative problem solving. While facts and how-to information have their place in environmental behavior change campaigns, so do art and fostering imagination beyond rational understanding. The Oakland Museum of California currently has an excellent exhibition about African American educator and activist Angela Davis, whose fight against mass incarceration and racism in the 60’s and 70’s made her an icon of Black liberation around the world. The show draws on a huge archive of newspaper clippings, posters, pamphlets, buttons and pop culture objects to tell Davis’s story in the political and cultural context of the time. What makes many of the visuals so powerful is how the call for social change and art are intertwined. Most striking are the political posters with bold, screen-printed images and collages.

In a recorded interview, looping on a large screen as part of the exhibit, Davis comments on the crucial role art plays in social change movements. She notes, “Art can produce knowledge that doesn’t occur with a simple political speech.” Such knowledge doesn’t arise from taking in facts alone and involves much more than the rational part of our brain. As with storytelling, art activates all parts of the human brain, enabling the level of empathy and engagement that can indeed motivate the change we need to see. This is especially important when there is urgency to act but the path forward isn’t clear. As Davis says, “Art enriches our ideas about change. It allows us to grasp what we cannot yet understand and enables us to imagine different modes of being.”

Vivid visual communication is a staple of effective behavior change campaigns.The upcoming Earth Month offers an opportunity to make art a campaign focus. How do you use the power of art in your outreach?

Recycling Is Not Broken, but Can Use Some Help: A National Zero Waste Conference Session

The Gigantic Team

zero waste conference hero imageWhile recycling has been getting a bad rap recently, the recent National Zero Waste Conference offered some fresh and hopeful perspectives. Gigantic Team Member Dennis Uyat coordinated the session: “Recycling Is Not Broken, But Can Use Some Help.” The conference was attended by over 400 people, and the session was moderated by Maurice Sampson, Eastern Pennsylvania Director of Clean Water Action.

Recent years have seen a shift towards upstream solutions like source reduction and reuse, however, recycling still has a place in the transformation of materials like paper, glass, metal, and plastic into new and useful products. Neil Seldman of the Recycling Cornucopia Project and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, opened with an overview of an increase in domestic recycling  markets and infrastructure since the National Sword Policy began to be enforced in 2018 in China. He writes, “Despite the fact that China had been warning for years that this cut-off was coming, U.S. recyclers were stunned and unprepared. But eventually, as prices for secondary materials fell in the tumult caused by the Chinese ban, private investment began re-building the U.S. manufacturing sector, and end-use capacity that had languished during the years that recycling collectors shipped a large percentage of materials to China rather than supplying domestic mills, returned to use.”

Many cities in the U.S. have implemented single-stream recycling systems, but they are not the only, or most cost effective, option. Speaker Joanne Schafer, Deputy Executive Director of the Centre County Recycling and Refuse Authority (CCRRA), spoke about their curb-sort recycling program in rural central Pennsylvania.

Municipalities that implement recycling often consider going with a single-stream system, and CCRRA hired MSW Consultants to see if it would be more cost effective to centralize recycling. They found that with the current weekly collection and 90% participation, the capital costs – a new MRF and truck fleet along with future costs of an education campaign – did not justify a system change. In this case, source separation of glass, cardboard, mixed paper, recyclable plastics and metals at the curb was more effective for residents and collectors.

Centre County, Pennsylvania is a good example of how grassroots recycling efforts in prior decades turned into a viable financial model. The decision to invest in labor over capital proved fruitful in the development of more localized recycling economies, which are less vulnerable to the whims of international global markets and commodity prices.

The session ended with Gary Liss, of the Recycling Is Infrastructure Too Campaign and Zero Waste USA, who laid out the American Recycling Infrastructure Plan, which vies for federal funding for community based recycling programs. It covers 50 initiatives with $18.3 billion allocated for the build-out of recycling infrastructure over three years. The Plan advocates “for the inclusion of waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting infrastructure and programs that will stem climate disruption, address racial injustice, and create thousands of jobs throughout the country.” Gary detailed a number of current EPA Green Infrastructure Funding Opportunities.

Recycling is often dismissed as big industries continue producing plastic and waste by design, which invariably ends up being burned in incinerators or buried in landfills. The Second Recycling Revolution is driven by grassroots efforts to build local community power, to redesign a more circular economy.

Regular people are finding big and small solutions to municipal solid waste problems. Gary ended with a question for the audience, “How much waste are you for?,” and the audience responded, “Zero!”

Find out more about the National Zero Waste Conference.

Which Message is Best? Results from a Pilot Cart Tagging Project in Sunnyvale, California

Lisa Duba

Gigantic Idea Studio teamed up with Sunnyvale, California with the challenge to refresh their “FoodCycle” food scrap collection program outreach and improve participation rates. The question was, how?

social norming message tag
One tag version had messages of social norming and the benefits of foodcycling.

After surveying residents, we found that self-reported participation was actually fairly high at 63%, but cart audits showed a lower citywide participation rate of 57% and weekly participation of 45%.

The City wanted more program collateral, how-to videos and a presentation to help them communicate about the program, but also wanted to explore behavior-change tactics in a pilot program. Our team proposed a communications campaign as a baseline strategy, that would be supplemented with cart tagging in two pilot areas. The pilot would determine whether or not cart tagging improved participation more than advertisements, articles and videos. Together, we set a goal to raise weekly participation by 5%.

The two pilot areas were given two different messaging strategies: Social Norming and Benefit messaging vs. Addressing Barriers messaging. The social norming tag showed residents and their quotes about why they FoodCycled—and then listed the benefits of participation, such as reducing waste and fighting climate change. It also clearly stated that 63% of residents participate, a clear majority of support and enthusiasm. The second group received messaging related to overcoming barriers to participation, such as tips to avoid mess, smells and pests, and alternative collection containers for smaller kitchens or those concerned with aesthetics.

The more effective tag addressed barriers to food scrap recycling.

Although both strategies are part of the popular “Community-Based Social Marketing” practices, the cart audits showed that the “Barriers” messaging worked better in Sunnyvale. The households that received a cart tag with tips saw an increase of 9% (from 44% to 53%) in weekly participation and 7% in overall participation, when compared to the baseline.

Both types of messages were included in the communications campaign, but the pilot project shows that cart tagging adds effectiveness that can be measured. This is likely related to the personal and contextual message delivery method—the cart—which is related to the behavior change we are asking for.

Many cities will be conducting cart audits as part of SB 1383’s statewide requirements. Adding friendly, yet effective messaging designed to increase participation in organics programs is a good way to maximize the investment of labor required to do these audits. This messaging can be combined with contamination feedback and included on the back side of any cart tag.

We have experience designing these tags and providing guidance on how to determine messaging that resonates in your community. We’d love to hear from you!

Hard Numbers, Hard Truths: How Data from Spot Checks, Surveys and More Guide Outreach

The Gigantic Team

We know it’s best to base outreach on data that we get from research. Formal research can be costly, but actionable data is all around us – and it can help make public outreach more effective.

For the 2022 California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) Conference, Gigantic participated in a session about the use of surveys and spot checks to guide outreach. Our presentation gave examples from two of Gigantic’s clients: Cities of Milpitas and Livermore.

Among the suggestions:

  • Integrating some research into your outreach plan is better than none. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good: include lid flips and surveys into your budgets as feasible. There’s also data that does not need a specific budget because:
  • Outreach data is all around us. Your agency may not be able to afford a statistically rigorous survey, but quantitative data from hauler reports or lid flipping can be useful guides to what is working and what challenges arise. Qualitative data (individual questions or reactions that represent the concerns of a larger audience) can be gathered from phone help lines, comments at public meetings or from social media posts. Website statistics show us which content is or is not being accessed, what users are searching for and how/when they accessed the site; this is all guiding data for outreach.
  • Use data to react in real time. Are you getting a lot of questions on your social channel about plastic bags? Are lid flips showing an increase in a particular item of contamination? Respond to these questions with blog or social posts, or additional newsletter content, as promptly as possible.

See the full presentation here:

Learn more about CRRA here.

HHWhat? Outreach Challenges of Household Hazardous Waste

The Gigantic Team

Household Hazardous Waste: what a term! It’s a mouthful: three words that don’t really clarify what it encompasses. Add to that, city, hauler and marketing professionals like to shorten the term to HHW – which sounds even more mysterious. The EPA defines Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) as “leftover household products that can catch fire, react, or explode under certain circumstances, or that are corrosive or toxic.” Common HHW items include fluorescent bulbs, batteries, gasoline, household chemicals, pesticides, paints, antifreeze and asbestos…a real hodgpodge of toxic stuff.

At Gigantic, when tackling an HHW project, we start out thinking about our audience’s awareness of the problem. The problem with HHW is that it encompasses things as seemingly harmless as half-empty hair spray to those more easily perceived as dangerous, such as pesticides. When describing the hazards, we like the wording “toxic to you and/or the environment” to encompass all the potential negative outcomes.

Understanding HHW: Does It Matter?

When doing outreach, it’s important to describe the issue or item in question before you tell people what to do about it and give them a reason to dispose carefully. However, when considering HHW, we wonder, “do people really need to know the term?” Not necessarily. Communicating how HHW items should be handled can work either way:

  1. Explain the term and help people understand which items are considered HHW, then let them know how to safely dispose of it.
  2. Encourage use of a general “what goes where” app like StopWaste’s re:source tool that includes HHW items, without requiring the user to identify them as such. (IMAGE w link https://resource.stopwaste.org

image of search in re:source

Connect HHW Items with Real World Examples

It can also be helpful to put HHW disposal in context. When might residents be most likely to think about getting rid of HHW? Maybe before putting their house up for sale, when contemplating a spring cleaning or when tackling DIY house projects? Messaging that connects an activity with HHW items is more likely to be memorable.

Go Beyond the Carts

It could help if HHW items were called out more prominently in recycling guides as a category that needs different treatment, such as a “Not Accepted Curbside” or “Special Items”  category.

Go for Impact

It also makes sense to focus on the HHW items that are most problematic in your area. Rather than implying the need to grasp a long list of items, focus on raising awareness about one item at a time, choosing those that would be most impactful if they were disposed of properly.

Thinking through the challenges and solutions of communicating about HHW before starting campaign design will save time and effort, while keeping people and nature safer.

SB 1383: Composting Outreach to Multi-Family Residents

Lisa Duba
Man emptying compost pail into correct cart
A new campaign encourages organic material composting for multi-family residents.

SB 1383 requires everyone in California — residents and businesses — to separate and compost organic materials, such as plant trimmings, leaves, grass and food scraps. In much of the Bay Area, yard trimmings and food scrap collection has been offered to single-family households for years. But the new law is providing a much-needed push to roll out food scrap collection service to multi-unit buildings. These buildings, which can have a few as four and up to hundreds of individual units, provide challenges, but also opportunities to keep more organic material out of the landfill.

Food scrap collection is an entirely new concept to the vast majority of apartment, condo and and townhome residents, and a clear and effective outreach program is a must-have. Outreach is ideally implemented at each building site. A successful program requires a good partnership between the service provider, the city or waste agency, and the property manager.

Gigantic is proud to have been part of a great collaboration with the South Bayside Waste Management Authority and their service provider, Recology, to create a composting campaign for apartment and condo residents.

Our team helped focus the campaign for the end-user of the program: the resident. The campaign will support the work of Recology’s implementation team and include a doorhanger for individual units and a poster for lobbies, trash areas and mail rooms. Both highlight the new food scrap composting requirement and link via QR code to a step-by-step instructional video. To support this site-specific outreach, we’ll be promoting the video on social media via paid promotion.

The video works to show, not tell, and visually communicates the food scrap recycling process. The addition of select graphic captions help identify key steps in the process. Voice-over in three languages (English, Spanish and Cantonese) help reach residents who may otherwise miss the message, while providing more detailed information.

Our video also includes 1383-required messaging about the law and its goal to reduce greenhouse gases.

We enjoyed working with this highly motivated client team. The program rolled out in June and we look forward to seeing the results!

Garden Pots and Mulch Bags, OH MY!

Kas Neteler

On a recent chilly early Monday morning in March, Stef and I were conducting spot checks* for our client, Livermore Recycles. In a single lid-flipping morning, we walk several miles and record data on approximately 200 residential trash/recycling/composting set-outs. I flip the lid on each cart and call out what I see while Stef records the data on her clipboard.

On this morning, a pattern was beginning to emerge. From the compost cart we could tell folks were definitely working on their gardens and yards this time of year AND some of them were confused about where their nursery pots and mulch bags should end up. Unfortunately, film plastics such as mulch bags and those black flimsy pots belong in the trash – we found several set-outs where these items were contaminating the organics cart and the recycling cart.

flower pots wrongly placed in recycling and organics carts

As a result of seeing this in the field on Monday, and verifying with the team that this continued throughout the week, we were able to create a social media post prior to the next weekend to let Livermore residents know:

FB post about trashing mulch bags and pots

We were quite pleased when we saw the comments and likes come in:

positive comments on the post

I’d call that a Gigantic success and a good example of how we can act upon what we see is needed in a short amount of time.

*Gigantic Idea Studio, has been flipping lids in Livermore twice a year (Spring and Fall since 2017. This involves early morning starts to stay ahead of the Livermore Sanitation trucks as we flip lids on approximately 1,000 setouts during a single week. The data is collected, reviewed and reported back to the client, along with recommendations for messaging specific to Livermore residents’ needs.

The Social Media Swamp: How to Deal with Anti-Environmental Comments

Lisa Duba
meme - what the otter sees
Dealing with the social swamp isn’t easy

As many of us know from running environmental campaigns on social media: online platforms bring out the best in some and the worst in others. It can be disheartening to learn that not everyone is as supportive of clean water, wildlife, or air quality as we are. What seems a no-brainer to us, (do you actually WANT pollution in your water?), is anathema to others.

For some of us who monitor these online conversations, (and I include myself here) it may be hard to read and manage negative comments that target our work or the things we are trying to protect. Fortunately, my unflappable colleague at Gigantic, Nancy Roberts, coached me through this aspect of our work in our recent campaign for Respect Wildlife. In this blog, I’ll share what I learned from her “Keep Calm and Carry On” approach to social media management. You can view the campaign here.

Nancy’s Top 3 Social Media Comment Tips

1. Don’t take comments personally. If monitoring comments becomes mentally taxing, take breaks or assign the task to someone else.

2. Understand that comments are data points.

3. Establish a comment policy: Include how you will deal with profanity, bullying, slurs, violent language, or other troublesome content, and create a threshold for when you will hide or delete a comment. If you are a government agency, you may need to adhere to free speech regulations and let comments stand, more so than nonprofits or private businesses, which can set their own policies.

For Facebook: Hide rather than delete comments. This will prevent conflict.
For Instagram: You can’t hide comments; delete only if absolutely necessary.
For Twitter: You cannot hide replies; if they are truly egregious you can report to Twitter.

Decide how/if you want to respond to comments. In most cases we recommend no response unless there is significant misinformation. Let other commenters step in to present an alternative viewpoint or challenge the naysayers. This is more authentic.

Lessons Learned from Our Recent Respect Wildlife Campaign:

As mentioned above, comments are rich sources of feedback, even the negative ones. Here are some takeaways on the campaign that we and the client gained through comment feedback:

  • Not everyone loves animals or cares if animals are hurt. (Especially seagulls!) Some people view humans at the top of food chain, and therefore it’s ok show dominance. While not the majority, this view is especially hard to deal with, but an important thing to remember. Appeals to protection, being a good person, etc. will not work for this type of individual.
  • Regulations, even those meant to protect vulnerable species, are viewed by a vocal minority as government control and overreach, and inspire especially negative comments.
  • Not everyone understands or supports a humorous approach. Many expressed enjoyment of the campaign’s exaggerated artwork style, but it inspired some very literal thinkers to call out the “falsehoods” shown in the memes. (We actually did know that otters don’t really see humans as swamp creatures!)
  • If feeding or approaching wildlife is “fun” for humans and pets, it’s considered harmless.

Good luck on your next social media campaign! I hope you connect with supporters and learn from the detractors.

Rainwater: Collecting Our Most Precious Resource

Lisa Duba
water scene at Magic Johnson Park
Magic Johnson Recreation Area, Los Angeles, CA

It’s mid-December, and we’re on our second “big rain event” of 2021-22 rainy season in the Bay Area. It’s been four weeks since the last storm, and for the past three years, total rainfall is way below average. This is a predicted new pattern: less frequent rain, bigger storms, persistent drought cycles. And, as the storms get bigger and rain falls in a shorter period of time, our storm drain systems can get overwhelmed and much of the precious water can wash away into the bay and ocean.

This past year, our team has worked with stormwater professionals in California to research the best ways to promote stormwater management techniques—that already exist—to capture and use rain water from these storms. A great example of what’s possible is Magic Johnson Recreation Area in Los Angeles.

This beautiful park uses built-in systems that mimic nature, and sustain the park while preventing pollution, capturing water, and providing residents with a beautiful open space.

Stormwater education has been almost exclusively focused on the pollution that stormwater carries to our waterways. The good news is that “capture and use” projects also clean the water, so it can be used on site for irrigation. This leaves more of our water supply for humans and wildlife.

Green stormwater infrastructure is an elegant solution that results in many benefits to communities: green space, more water supply, less dependance on importing water. It seems like a win-win, but is lacking in public awareness, funding, and integration with statewide water supply planning.

It will take ongoing effort to rebrand stormwater as a resource, and not as a source of pollution. Our team will do our best to help the industry simplify technical terms and jargon to resonate with voters and elected officials who need to support projects in their communities, and to state officials who must fund them.