Choices to Help You Break the Disposable Habit

How do we encourage people to use reusables instead of disposables? How do we create a meaningful campaign without preaching? How do we do this while considering our visitors who just want to sit down and have a picnic? And how do we leave food for thought even when people have already left Ramat Hanadiv and gone home?
Ramat Hanadiv’s expert team asked for your help in finding a solution and here are the results!

Photo by Ronny Keissary

Ecological footprint

This term is well-known among environmentalists and nature-lovers, but less known to most people. It is a theoretical estimate of the amount of resources required to run a human activity, presenting them in units of land per person in a way that illustrates the exploitation of the earth’s resources. An important component in the calculation of the footprint is the damage caused to the environment by pollutant emissions and waste, which may take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose.

As an organisation that is environmentally oriented and receives almost one million visitors per year, we tried to take on a challenge intended to reduce our ecological footprint and that of our visitors, or put more simply, to encourage a decision that will benefit the planet and reduce damage related to wasted energy and creation of waste.

As an organisation that is environmentally oriented and receives almost one million visitors per year, we tried to take on a challenge intended to reduce damage related to wasted energy and creation of waste.

Photo by Ronny Keissary

Breaking the disposable habit

At Ramat Hanadiv we make sure that any process undertaken is based on knowledge. Therefore, in the November 2021 magazine we asked you, our readers, what you think we should do to help our visitors break the disposable habitat and use only reusables at the picnic site.

The survey raised a few important points that we are trying to implement to the best of our ability.

Provide an alternative solution – we realised that it’s important to allow on-site purchase of reusables; therefore, we brought in sets of reusables at a friendly price to the InfoShop
Provide a dishwashing facility at the picnic site – this has yet to be fully implemented
Provide information that encourages use of reusables and describes the damage caused by disposable plastic. We adopted this recommendation enthusiastically. See below for further details.

Photo by Ronny Keissary

What are disposables?

Indeed, as its name suggests, a disposable utensil is a utensil that is used once. It might be a drinking straw, a cardboard pizza tray, or a disposable cup. One of the decisions we made was to deal specifically with plastic disposables. We use them for a few minutes, but it takes them hundreds of years to break down! They break down into tiny particles and pollute our environment, and there is no way to recycle them in Israel. This is just a dubious ‘taste’ of the damage they cause. So when we talk about waste and environmental damage, each disposable utensil causes a certain amount of damage, but there’s no doubt that plastic disposables cause the greatest amount of damage.

So how do we convince everyone to make the transition to reusables? We started a campaign…

How do we set up a campaign that isn’t one-off? One that causes people to think deeper, one that stays with you after you’ve encountered it, one that demands further reading and investigation, one that does not arouse antagonism. The world of advertising is often characterised by quick, changing messages that don’t go into detail. We wanted to do things differently. We wanted you to sit down and investigate.

Photo by Shira Leon Zchut

So we drew on the tables

Shira Leon Zchout, Sustainability Manager at Ramat Hanadiv, read dozens of papers and selected the most significant facts related to the damage caused by disposables on our health, the environment, and our pockets. We think that any person who becomes familiar with them will think twice about every utensil that he/she uses only once.

Hadas Miron, previously the Infographics Manager at Calcalist, was asked to design and illustrate infographics to illustrate the facts.

Ilai Hason, industrial design student, talented artist, and resident of nearby Zichron Ya’akov, was recruited to produce the tables themselves.

Breaking the disposable habit in three languages

Just like all the signs at Ramat Hanadiv, here too, the message was conveyed in three languages – Hebrew, Arabic and English – where each language received a different colour for simple, quick identification of the entire series of tables and the information they display.

We present you the results.
(Photos by Ronny Keissary)

The next time you go to the beach, a nature reserve, or a public park, you can also implement this positive habit and eat with reusables

Photo by Ronny Keissary

But the truth is that we will not be with you everywhere 🙂

So when you come for a picnic at Ramat Hanadiv, know that you can sit and eat over an elephant, the ocean, or giant cutlery. Investigate, think (and be surprised) about the damage related to disposables and the great importance of giving them up.

And the next time you go to the beach, a nature reserve, or a public park, you can also implement this positive habit and eat with reusables. You can even share your insights from our smart tables with your friends. And maybe you can also recommend that they break the disposable habit.

Creative: Michal Verdiger