Designing Eco-Feedback to Calculate Carbon Footprint of Ecological Waste

Abstract

Carbon footprint is a measure of the exclusive total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that is direct and indirectly caused by an activity. Carbon footprint is necessary because nowadays, almost all human activities will contribute to carbon emission, especially waste disposal. This paper discusses the feedback of designing an eco-feedback intervention, which is ecoWaste, to deliver feedback on individuals’ or groups’ behaviors (students of hostel residents) with a goal of reducing environmental impacts as a green campus initiative. Feedback is delivered by automatically sensing activities and feeding related information back through a computerized system. The objectives of this research are to design eco feedback that displays carbon footprint and to visualize information that calculate carbon footprint and motivate people’s actions which are to separate ecological waste and recycle. The eco-feedback was designed using an intervention technique that consists of information, comparison, incentive and reward or disincentive and punishment, commitment and feedback. For the evaluation, ten respondents of hostel residents were chosen to evaluate the ecoWaste web application for two weeks. Then the respondents were given questionnaires which consist of two parts which were demographic and behavior questions, and impact of design. From the findings, it is shown that ecoWaste can motivate people and create awareness on the importance of waste separation and by displaying the amount of carbon footprint in each waste, carbon footprint managed to be reduced.