Driving behaviour change for a cleaner Singapore​

Despite Singapore’s image as a clean city, this is largely due to the efforts of 58,000 workers who clean up its public spaces every day.

Public Hygiene Council (PHC) requires a strategic behavioural change project which goes beyond the current piece-meal behavioural intervention trials in order to: 

• Identify triggers and motivators, as well as challenges and barriers to proper litter binning​

• Develop behaviourally-informed recommendations to encourage habituation of proper litter binning behaviours.

1. Scoping: Review of organisational data, local and global literature; 20 x 90 min partner interviews

2. ​Quant validation and segmentation: N=1,000 nationally representative street-intercept survey, incorporating Discrete Choice Experiments to assess influence of contextual factors.​

3. Co-designing localised interventions with residents and community partners within prioritised Towns via a half-day workshop.

• Littering is heavily influenced by both contextual and individual level factors
• Amongst controllable infrastructure factors, fullness of bin is the most important, not distance to bin
• There are 5 distinct behavioural / attitudinal segments in the population, who pull apart on 2 key dimensions: sense of responsibility and concern about the issue

Our work has provided PHC with a more nuanced understanding of what drives littering / binning behaviour and how these differ across the Singapore population, with targeted strategies proposed for each segment.

We hosted our co-creation workshop with residents and community partners in March 2023, after which shortlisted ideas were taken forward to implement and test.