Hi everyone,
I’m interested in understanding how to effectively measure and track behavioral change in school-based sustainability initiatives such as recycling or composting programs.
What metrics or evaluation methods have worked best for you? Do you use participation rates, waste reduction data, or student engagement indicators?
Also, are there any simple tools or frameworks that help in analyzing and presenting these results clearly for educators and stakeholders?
Looking forward to your insights and experiences!
I’m interested in understanding how to effectively measure and track behavioral change in school-based sustainability initiatives such as recycling or composting programs.
What metrics or evaluation methods have worked best for you? Do you use participation rates, waste reduction data, or student engagement indicators?
Also, are there any simple tools or frameworks that help in analyzing and presenting these results clearly for educators and stakeholders?
Looking forward to your insights and experiences!
Great questions. I've asked my colleague Jon Rausseo who is Sustainability Manager at the University of Ottawa what he thinks about metrics and evaluation methods. Here is his response:
"For me, it is really a question of what resources you have available and how accurate do you want to be.
For your total recycling efforts, you can use your total diversion rate (total waste + total recycling / total recycling) but it really is an imperfect measure. Positive efforts to increase reuse or reduction actually end up hurting your diversion number.
You can simply look over your total waste numbers from year to year to give you an idea of if you are reducing your materials sent to landfill, but that doesn't capture your efforts to reduce and reuse.
Ideally you could use a third party company to come in and do an evaluation for you every year but it is very expensive.
Obtaining participation or engagement rates can also be a bit misleading because they don't always give you a sense of how well a participant understands the recycling system and is actually putting the proper items into the correct bins. Someone may be a very engaged recycler but not actually be recycling properly. And of course there is also a bias if you use a survey. People tend to exaggerate their understanding of properly recycling. In tests we did years ago we found that people tended to overestimate how much recycling they actually did.
So all this to say that the best metric is usually the one you can track easiest and brings the most value to your institution. If that is total waste over time, then use that. If it is diversion rate, then use that. Or even a combination of a few techniques if the information is easy to capture."
I can also answer your question about tools and frameworks. Tableau is a software platform for data visualization that you might consider using. It is known to be user friendly. If you're just looking to make infographics, Canva or Piktochart will work. And don't forget about a good old-fashioned PowerPoint presentation to convey results simply and easily. In terms of frameworks, one that is often used in sustainability is the traffic light system. For each behavior you are measuring, you can illustrate whether or not the behavior is on track (green light), in progress (yellow light), or off track (red light).
I hope this helps.
Kind regards,
Julie