Have you ever reached for the TV remote instead of getting up to press the buttons on the television? Or maybe you’ve started a new job and been automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan. You could opt out, but most people simply don’t bother.
Behavioural economists call this a nudge.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe a nudge as designing choices in a way that predictably influences behaviour without taking away people’s freedom. No force. No punishment. No bans. People can always decide differently, but the better option is made easier to follow.
In 2019, Chinese food delivery platform Ele.me, serving more than 753 million users, changed one setting at checkout. Instead of automatically including disposable cutlery, the default became no cutlery. Customers could still request it, but most never did.
Over the next 27 months, that single design change eliminated more than 225 million sets of plastic cutlery, preventing over 4,500 metric tons of waste and saving an estimated 56,000 trees.
It was a simple change, yet its environmental impact was enormous.
Every day we like to think we are shaping our decisions but, more often than we realise, they are quietly being shaped first. When changing something takes an extra step, most of us simply stick with what is already there.
Imagine if our homes, workplaces and communities were designed so the greener option became the easiest one. Sustainable choices would stop feeling like chores and instead become lasting habits that help build a cleaner, greener world.
Whether it’s reducing single-use plastics, reusing everyday items, recycling waste, saving energy or choosing sustainable products, meaningful environmental change begins with small actions repeated by millions of people. One of the fastest ways to make that happen isn’t to change minds but to redesign the choice, making greener solutions and sustainable actions the default. And when that happens, it no longer feels like a chore, it just becomes part of everyday life.
