HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR RESIDENTS? APPLYING BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE TO WASTE SERVICES
Spend dropped to around £250; online renewals rose from 20% to 46%, with 11,500 new online accounts created, twenty times normal volume. Why “No Fly-Tipping” Signs Backfire A “No fly-tipping” sign can increase fly-tipping, since it signals a known dumping ground the council clears quickly. A sign stating someone nearby was fined £400 works better, specific, believable, driven by social proof. Overused, though, these tricks wear thin and caution is advised. Bin behaviour, he noted, often runs on habit, not conscious choice; the real challenge is disrupting that autopilot. A Framework, Not a Formula He uses COM-B, developed by UCL, mapping the capability, opportunity, and motivation behind a behaviour. On one estate, waste analysis pointed to polystyrene as the contamination culprit, but walking the site revealed black bags were the real problem: a trusted local WhatsApp admin shifted behaviour where official letters hadn’t. On advertising’s future, Ridley-Moy favoured targeted digital ads over print, timed with weather forecasts to catch people heading outside, not in January. Awareness, environment and motivation must align, and no intervention is worth keeping unless you can measure it worked. Download: Behaviour Change Planner
Dominic Ridley-Moy Founder, Behaviour Change Network
COMMUNICATIONS CAMPAIGNS DRIVING RESULTS SECOND TIME LUCKY: HOW TRAFFORD TURNED EXPERIENCE INTO A 51,000 PERMIT SUCCESS
The Psychology of the Bin and Beyond: What Behavioural Science Can Teach the Waste Sector
Some services don’t succeed at the first attempt, not because they’re the wrong idea, but because timing and communication matters just as much as the idea itself. That’s the lesson from Trafford Council, where the same garden waste scheme initially struggled before thriving the second time, purely on the strength of its communication. A Learning Curve Trafford first introduced a charge for garden waste in 2017. It ran for two years before a new administration paused it. Permits sat on disconnected systems, the call centre was stretched, and crews kept emptying bins without a valid permit in place. Trust took a knock, and numbers slipped as residents realised checks weren’t being made. Round Two, Done Differently Relaunching in 2025, the team took eight months’ lead time, brought in a reliable external permit provider, and treated the first attempt as a lesson in storytelling, not service design. The change looked small, but needed careful explaining, since food waste stayed free and neighbouring boroughs still collected garden waste at no cost.
The Comms Machine Residents moved through three phases: awareness, urgency, then enforcement. It began with internal briefings and a public consultation, followed by council tax bill inserts, a dedicated website, and social posts leaning on the “rule of seven.” The standout channel was physical bin tags, timed to hit residents exactly when they engaged with the service, staggered to avoid overwhelming the system. Crew briefings and aligned updates kept every touchpoint consistent. The Payoff The result: 51,000 permits in 2025, stronger online uptake, and no overwhelmed systems. Sixty-one percent of households with a garden subscribed. Trafford’s takeaways: start internal comms early and involve teams, not just inform them; consistency prevents complaints; and sequencing beats volume. As the team put it, it wasn’t just the service that delivered the results — it was how they communicated it.
How many decisions does a person make in a day? 35,000 is often quoted as a good guess, most on autopilot. It’s how behaviour change expert Dominic Ridley-Moy captured The Little Green Event attendee’s attention: before comms teams try to change resident behaviour, they need to understand how little conscious thought most behaviour involves. Fix the Problem Before Running Comms Dominic traces his interest to garden waste renewals at the London Borough of Havering, where the council spent around £10,000 a time on newspaper ads pushing online renewals, for almost no return. That failure led him to books like Nudge, and a realisation: the fix isn’t always a comms campaign, but the service itself. He simplified the renewal form buried under 15 steps, heat-mapped where eyes landed on the letter, and moved the phone number to the back of the page to nudge self- service, cutting print advertising entirely.
THE NUMBERS SUBSCRIPTIONS 2017/18 - 45,000 permits 2018/19 - 43,000 permits 2025/26 - 51,000 permits 61% of our properties with gardens
Have you checked out the bio-bin?
SUBSCRIPTIONS BOOSTER TOOL TRIALLED WITH HIGHLAND COUNCIL
THE LONG ROAD: GARDEN WASTE IN THE HIGHLANDS Few councils face logistics quite like Highland Council’s. Covering an area the size of Belgium, with six inhabited islands, 4,000 miles of road, and just 134,000 households, The Highland Waste Team hauls black bag waste four hours to Dunbar for processing, at roughly £200 a tonne. Against that backdrop, garden waste has been something of an afterthought. Charging began in 2017, prices crept up for three years running, and uptake has sat around 30% of eligible properties ever since, with no clear picture of why. That’s now changing. Working with PermaServ, Highland has started properly analysing its subscriber data for the first time: roughly 24,000 loyal customers, a 10% churn rate, and thousands of lapsed or intermittent subscribers
nobody had previously tracked. The findings are already reframing decisions; rather than another blanket price rise, the team can now make the case to politicians that recovering lapsed customers should come first. Next steps include targeted letters to lapsed households (UPRN data suggests most haven’t simply moved away), mapping subscriber patterns and finally introducing direct debit payments. As Imogen put it, the data doesn’t just inform pricing, it earns the argument for holding it steady. PermiServ are thrilled to be working on this tool internally to eventually roll out to all of our customer bases, free of charge. Watch this space for more developments! Source: The Little Green Event 2026 Speaker Imogen Percy-Bell, Principal Waste Management Officer, Highland Council and PermiServ
UPPER VENTILATION GRID
LOWER VENTILATION GRID
LID IN LID
INTERNAL BASE
CUSTOMISATION BY THERMAL TRANSFER GRAPHIC
PEDAL
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