Motivating sustainable consumption from community-based social marketing perspective: An experimental case in higher education

Changing habits of people which negatively affect the environment and developing new environment-friendly behavior are important for sustainable living. Because, the world that we live in is unique. In the past it was faced enormous environmental damages along with industrialization and urbanization and those harmful effects also continue now. Therefore, to develop environment-friendly life styles, we need to make new scientific research that is mostly related with this field.In this study, we investigate how to improve environmentalist behavior in communities within the sustainable consumption behavior perspective. In this study we use community-based social marketing approach, which is conducted in Çukurova University. The study was designed as pre-test post-test control group experimental design, in which the groups were designed as two control and one experimental group. The experimental group is determined as faculty?s second building and the control group is determined as faculty?s other staff in the first building.During this study, to develop environmental-friendly behavior (recycling of waste paper), we make observation and determine tangible barriers (location of container, inside waste boxes, unsystematic prosesses and etc.) and intangible barriers (unawareness, lack of motivation, ignorance of subject etc.). Then we eliminate these factors. Target group (experimental group) was encouraged to environmental-friendly behavior with logo, labels, enviornmental board, informing meeting and electronic mail. We have weighed waste (throwing to garbage) and recycled paper before and after intervention and these results were compared. At the end of one month, the quantity of waste paper (throwing to garbage) decreased from 3.19 kg to 0.18 kg in experimental group. We observed that there was no change (an average 3.07 kg) in the control group. Moreover, we determine that the quantity of the waste paper containers is 28.2 kg in control group, while it is measured 130.9 kg in experimental group.