Enticing Consumers to Avoid Waste - Digital and Analogue Ways of Raising their Awareness

Waste prevention is a top priority of waste management. It takes mainly place outside the waste regime, although it is a duty of waste management authorities. They have to encourage producers of products and goods to engage in waste prevention. Still, in official documents strategies directed at waste prevention at the consumer level are either very generic or at a very operational level. This paper argues that a change of actions at consumers' level cannot be achieved by applying a “one-kindserves-all” strategy of measures but rather has to be tailored appropriately to the consumers' level of experience. Consumers who have not yet become acquainted with an issue need to be approached by other measures than those who have already nearly reached the tipping point of changing their way of acting. We build on concepts taken from attitudes' research, sustainable education and from marketing to devise an MA-AIDA (Modification of Acting - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) Model to define measures aiming at the particular consumers' needs. We use cases and examples taken from secondary research and from our own action research experience to fill the model with respective examples.