UNDP
Ecuador
The Accelerator Lab in Ecuador worked on a series of behavioural insights experiments on waste management with a local citizen-led recycling initiative in Quito. The initiative made us of an existing mobile app ("ReciApp") that connects citizens to their local neighborhood waste picker to facilitate direct delivery of recyclable materials, without intermediaries. Personalized messages were sent to app users to test the effect of different cognitive biases such as: loss aversion, social pressure and the environmental vs. social incentives to recycle. The tests achieved an increase in downloads of the recycling app (over 5.000 users vs 2.000 users before the experiments) as well as an increase in the number of reported recyclable material delivered to waste pickers (51 average deliveries reported in the app before the experiments vs. 450 monthly reports during the experiments = 700% increase).