Inspiring Individuals to Reduce Carbon Emissions
In July, New American Dream launched its Carbon Conscious Consumers (C3) campaign, a new effort to help individuals connect consumer
choices to positive impacts for the environment.
The C3 campaign challenged individuals to take monthly steps to reduce their personal carbon footprints. From eating locally to driving less, reducing junk mail, using alternatives to bottled water, washing clothes in cold water, and bringing reusable bags when shopping, the steps were designed to be simple, achievable, and habit forming.
By making plain the connection between everyday activities and climate change, we hoped to motivate people to take on bigger actions. Participants registered their pledges on our C3 website, where they could track the aggregate impact from all participants across all months (displayed graphically on a map), tally each step's total pledges, and see their personal impact on the campaign, including friends and friends -of-friends they got to sign up. New American Dream gave prizes—such as a $20,000 eco-garden makeover donated by landscape designer Jim Pollack—to those who were most successful at persuading friends and family to join them in pledging.
The C3 campaign got a significant boost from environmentally
responsible yogurt maker, Stonyfield Farm, which promoted the
campaign through its Profits for the Planet program. Stonyfield distributed 20 million foil yogurt lids (designed themselves to
reduce waste from the yogurt containers), showcasing New
American Dream and two other non-profit organizations.
In all we convinced nearly 70,000 individuals to lower their carbon footprint—eliminating an estimated 2.9 million pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—and brought tens of thousands more people into the New Dream community, expanding our activist base to over 140,000 individuals.
