Incubating Consumer Behavior Change By Making Student Reuse On Campus Convenient

by Tamar Burton

The lesson of The Three R’s - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle helped us shape our view of the environment. Building sustainable communities is an important challenge faced by millennials and requires innovation to enact consumer behavior change. America’s college students have embraced new solutions pertaining to reducing and recycling, but the area that hasn’t been addressed properly is reuse.

According to research by the NPD Group, the average U.S. household has over $7,000 worth of unused merchandise ranging from electronics and furniture; to textbooks and sporting goods. Overall, this excess merchandise accounts for $1 trillion worth of idle surplus. Think about reuse, everybody does it, right? Typically, the response given is: yes, I promote reuse on these websites. But, probe further and inquire when they last engaged reuse, and the response is a surprisingly dated: a year ago, two years ago, or I don’t recall. Clearly, reuse is not an adopted behavior although subconsciously it is.

Tradepal’s one-click technology seeks to remedy this by making reuse easy and convenient. The platform simplifies the reuse process to enable users to list items in seconds, broadcast their virtual sale to their campus and friends, and seamlessly buy, sell and barter with peers. It also gamifies reuse as students are able to quantify their environmental impact through a dedicated carbon savings calculator.

Tradepal has recognized the problem with stuff and set its mission to make reuse as easy as recycling. Several colleges and universities have embraced the initiative to offer a convenient way for students to promote reuse by launching a campus reuse network on Tradepal. Tradepal made a commitment to action with CGI America to deploy its reuse platform to 100 college campuses and derive 20,000 metric tons of carbon savings from reuse by June 2014.

Millennials hold the key to a sustainable and resilient future. By integrating innovation on campus, higher education provides students with opportunities to experiment and determine the best methods for introducing sustainable solutions. These experiences will prove pivotal in scaling consumer behavior change beyond college campuses and into the mainstream.

See also:

The Forgotten R of the Environment

Sustainability vs Storage Wars Epidemic

Climate Policy: Transitioning Behavior Change