Zero Waste Forum Keynote

Most people get into zero waste the same way: someone they knew –or barely knew — did something that caught their eye, and that was the beginning.

Mine started with a guy named Darshan Karwat, who I still haven't met. In 2011, he went zero waste for a year and gave a talk about it at the University of Michigan. My sister heard it and four years later, she and I were in Beijing doing air pollution research, and when we needed a topic for a brown-bag presentation, she pulled that talk out of her memory. We ended up telling seven colleagues at the NRDC that we were going to try zero waste for a year — and asking them to join us.

That seed grew into ZeroWaste.Org over the next decade.

I opened my keynote at the National Zero Waste Forum with this story, not because it's remarkable, but because it isn't. Almost everyone in that room had a version of it.

There's a name for what happened with Darshan: the ripple effect. Study after study confirms that when people near us — physically or socially — do something, we're significantly more likely to follow suit.

One study on solar adoption in California found that each additional installation in a zip code increased the likelihood of the next by 0.78 percent. What we do makes it easier, and more likely that someone else will do it too. 

Another study followed 12,067 people over 32 years and found that behavioral influence travels up to three degrees through social networks — to your friends' friends' friends.

The takeaway for our sector: we are not primarily in the business of persuasion. We are in the business of making visible, desirable, approachable behavior legible to the people around our participants.

That reframe matters. It means the most important output of any program isn't the behavior change in the person who signed up — it's the ripple that person creates.

Not every action ripples. Based on the research and what we've observed in our own programs, three conditions seem to matter most:

1. Visibility. The behavior has to be legible to others. Zero waste has a structural advantage here — many of the behaviors involved (bringing your own container, refusing a bag, sorting at a shared bin) are inherently social. They interrupt the default and, in doing so, they register.

2. Desirability. People need to understand that there's something worth wanting here. The research is encouraging: most people already support the idea of consumption reduction. What they're looking for is social permission to act differently. This is why guilt and shame tends to backfire — they create avoidance, not action. What creates action is the perception that people like me do things like this.

3. Approachability. People have to be able to picture themselves doing it. The gap between "I agree with this" and "I can do this" is where most programs lose people. Closing that gap means designing entry points that feel rightsized — not too easy to be meaningful, not so hard that they filter out everyone except the already-committed.

Most program design in this sector optimizes for participation volume. I'd argue we should also be optimizing for ripple yield — how many new participants does each existing participant generate?

Three mechanisms we've found worth building into programs:

Teams. Letting people join or form teams introduces identity and affiliation into the experience. Being part of a team gives people something to signal to others — and it makes "join our team" a much easier ask than "join this program." It also turns out to be a useful lever for bringing other organizations into your work.

Referral pathways. About 10% of people in any program are natural connectors — they relish introducing people and ideas. Building a lightweight referral mechanism (a link, a small reward, a tracking system) gives these people a structured way to do what they already want to do. One good connector can bring in more participants than a well-placed ad.

Testimonials and shared motivations. Asking people to articulate why they're participating does two things: it reinforces their own commitment at the moment of highest motivation, and it gives you content that shows prospective participants that people like them are already involved. Seth Godin's framing is useful here — "people like me do things like this" is the subtext that converts a curious observer into a participant.

I think the ripple effect gives us permission to stop trying to reach everyone directly — and to invest more deeply in the people who are already showing up.

We are not individually responsible for delivering this message to enough people that it tips the scales. We are responsible for giving the people we do reach the tools, the lens, and the confidence to be change agents themselves. The ripple does the rest.

That's a different job. It's less about volume and more about depth. Less about acquisition and more about activation. Less about pulling people through the door, and more about creating conditions that make them want to walk through it on their own — and hold it open for someone else.

The systemic and policy wins we're working toward get much more achievable when the social landscape is already shifting. That's what the ripple effect can do.