Whiping the habit - An interdisciplinary research on the alteration of the environmentally harmful human activities revolving around the use of toilet paper

Abstract

The growing use of toilet paper on a global scale has negative environmental impacts such as deforestation, loss of biodiversity and water depletion. The discipline of MMW consequently proposes potential policies based on traditional behavioral change methods within environmental policy, that could reduce these impacts. According to the discipline of NWI, Social Practice Theory could add to these methods, by moving away from using rational choice as the main driver of human behavior towards using practice-based interventions that alter the practice as a whole. Following, the discipline of CNBP discusses behavioral change techniques such as nudging and disgust based interventions.

Due to the different disciplinary perspectives, each discipline has different views on what the harmful human activities are, and how these should be altered. By extending the meaning from ‘the unsustainable production, use and disposal of toilet paper’ to inclusion of ‘the use of toilet paper’, governmental bodies can reorientate for potential targets of their policies. The organization of the disciplinary insights on the alteration of behaviour has led to a complementary map that provides various strategies to achieve behavioural change. These included top-down measures using strategies of punishment and rewarding, but measures on how the embedded use of toilet paper as a practice could be targeted and altered by shaping environments.The creation of common ground was followed by an integration of the new concept of harmful human activity and the theory on the alteration of behaviour, which offered a broader perspective for the construction of policies that aim to reduce the negative environmental impacts associated with toilet paper use. By applying the technique of horizontal integration, it was revealed that the integrated assumptions and perspectives can help to form policy interventions that create a more structural change. The extended concept of harmful human activity makes these policy interventions aim at achieving this structural change with both preventive and reactive measures.