If you see something wrong happening in the world, you can either do nothing or you can do something. And I already tried nothing. Image courtesy of Von Wong and a Video (3 mins)
The Origin of Eden
“If you remove the impact, you remove the business, and vice versa.”
Eden is an impact venture founded in 2019 by Gray Elkington. This means that Eden has a self-sustaining operating model, which is investable and therefore rapidly scalable.
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
“The path of least resistance is to re-invent litter-picking”
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 longer a huge problem.
Littering happens for myriad complex reasons and is difficult to control. Picking up litter happens for 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 clean 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. Known as pikkers (pikker being a “protector of the holy river), each pikker will patrol a set route - a “Walk” - once a week. Given enough pikkers, each Walk will be patrolled or “pikked” twice a week.
We do so in a SMART way:
Specific: #PristineParish has a specific meaning. “Pristine” means the entire parish has been pikked twice in the past week. And “parish” is a definable area - it has a boundary.
Measurable: Pikking activity is logged on the Parish Rota, litter hauls are snapped and uploaded to the parish gallery and parishes are colour-coded by a RAG Performance System according to whether they are a #PristineParish, a #PristineParish Contender or a #PristineParish Prospect.
Assignable: Each parish has an online cleaning rota of volunteers who have a visceral connection with their parish and a WhatsApp Group to ask for and offer cover.
Realistic: A volunteer needs flexibility so can pik on a day and at a time of their choice within a three-day window each week. They pik alone or with family or friends. Given there’s no need to congregate with others outside their bubble, it’s time-efficient and covid-safe. Indeed, pikking continued throughout the Covid pandemic while community picks in other parishes were cancelled.
Time-related: A parish has a goal to achieve every week: pik the entire parish road network twice.
Eden recruits new pikkers, manages and monitors the pikking, and offers ongoing support as needed.
The Business Model
The Eden business model is to provide and charge for a new kind of roadside advertising, one that yields green brownie points for the advertiser or parish patron who wishes to appeal to the conscious consumer.
We place a patron’s brand on our hi-vis vests and they pay according to a formula based on the hours of pikking needed to keep their sponsored parish(es) pristine.
Patrons’ adspend is used to:
Provide free grabbers, vests, guidance and ongoing support to participating parishes
Spread the message and enrol other parishes nationwide
What has been a cost-centre for councils, insufficiently paid for by taxpayers, and therefore done as little and as cheaply as possible is now a profit-centre that generates a win for parishes, a win for brands and a win for us all in that it provides a practical path to a #pristineplanet.
Changing Culture
Dealing with litter and fly tips in parishes involves changing systems, processes, and thus behaviours. Gray has 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 mission that he took on when he returned to his Cotswold home after spending a while in China:
“When I lived in Shanghai, I picked up litter, 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 and bin it. Anything lying on the ground looked so out of place that it demanded a response.
Little Rissington, my home parish, is not at that stage yet, but it will be - in time. Up to the end of 2018 it was cleaned twice a year. Since early 2019, the parish has been cleaned twice a week.
And people certainly appreciate it. They slow down to shout thanks. They give the thumbs up.
That makes us a great platform for brands to demonstrate their eco-credentials, with their logo on our vests and their funding helping to make parishes more liveable.”