The Origin of Eden

Eden is a non-profit Community Interest Company (C.I.C) founded in 2019 by Gray Elkington. A C.I.C is a special type of limited company designed to benefit the community rather than private shareholders.

Eden’s purpose is to make the natural and built environments more liveable for all animals, which includes us, of course.

The Pollution Emergency

Litter is the initial target since it's usually the most obvious example of pollution within a parish, and pollution is one of the UN's three planetary emergencies. What chance of people being persuaded to care about the other two (climate change and loss of nature) if we appear careless about rubbish on our own doorstep?

Changing Culture is Key... but whose?

Gray has decades of experience working on generating change in working practices in companies and governments. He is now applying his knowledge of behavioural drivers to changing people’s attitude to litter. At the core of the Eden approach is the behavioural scientific finding that:

Before one can hope to see a significant change in the attitudes and behaviour of people to littering, existing litter needs to be removed from streets, highways, parks and other public locations. Using Behavioural Insights to Reduce Littering

Change the culture of least resistance

Gray recognises that the path of least resistance is not to try to stop littering but instead to re-invent litter-picking such that litter is no more of a problem than a potato peeling that’s fallen onto one’s kitchen floor.

Littering happens for myriad complex reasons and is difficult to control. Picking up litter happens for a few simpler reasons and is therefore easier to influence.

By changing attitudes to litter-picking, Gray intends to turn a multitude of litter-loathers into an army of parish-keepers, i.e. house-keepers who treat their parish as an extension of their home and who will each clean a part of their parish once a week just as they do their home.

Pushing at an open door

Eden’s strategy is therefore to show that a #pristineparish is easy to establish and maintain. Parish by parish, we organise residents to remove all litter from the parish roads and then keep them litter-free. We’re known as pikkers, Pikker being the protector of the holy river. Each pikker patrols a set route once a week. Given enough pikkers, each route is patrolled twice a week.

We do so in a SMART way:

Specific: #PristineParish has a specific meaning. “Parish” is a definable area - it has a boundary. And “Pristine” means ALL parish routes were de-littered during the last patrol window.

Measurable: Each litter haul is photographed and uploaded via the Eden App. Patrol windows are colour-coded by a RAG Performance System according to whether NONE, SOME or ALL of the patrols were completed during the last two- or three-day window.

Assignable: Each parish has a rota of volunteers who have a visceral connection with their parish and a WhatsApp Group to ask for and offer cover.

Realistic: Volunteers need flexibility so they can patrol on a day and at a time of their choice within a patrol window each week. They patrol alone or with family and friends. Given there’s no need to congregate with others outside their bubble, it’s time-efficient and pandemic-proof. Indeed, patrolling continued throughout the Covid pandemic while community picks in other parishes were cancelled.

Time-related: A parish has a clear goal to achieve: de-litter all the parish routes during each patrol window.

Eden recruits new pikkers, manages and monitors the patrols, and offers ongoing support as needed.

Changing Culture

Dealing with litter and fly-tips in parishes involves changing systems, processes, and thus behaviours - the world over. Gray spent four decades with CEOs encouraging behaviour change in their organisations.

Now, with generous support from local stalwarts, he’s applying the same techniques to improving life in parishes, a quest that he pursued when he returned to his Cotswold home after spending a while in China:

“When I lived in Shanghai, I picked up litter on the rare occasion there was any, though I never once went ‘litter picking’. Green City, the district where I lived, was practically litter-free, so if I saw something I would pick it up. Anything lying on the ground looked so out of place that it demanded a response.

Up to the end of 2017 Little Rissington, my home parish, was litter picked twice a year. Since early 2019, when it adopted the #PristineParish Program, the entire parish has been de-littered twice a week.

And people certainly appreciate it. They slow down to shout thanks. They give a thumbs-up.

That makes us a great platform for brands to demonstrate their eco-credentials, with their funding helping to make parishes more liveable the world over.”