At last! A green loyalty currency
Town & Country Planning,
December 2001
My last Air Miles statement would have got me half way to Paris,
which is hardly Air Miles wealth - but it did remind me that one of the
functions of money is as an incentive. That's what loyalty cards and loyalty
points are all about.
Don't doubt, for example, that the three trillion unspent frequent flyer
miles, issued by US airlines over the past ten years, could have been
a majority accounting issue if they hadn't changed the rules to make them
expire.
But of course, loyalty points are more subtle than that. They are an information
system that can use spare capacity to get people to behave in a certain
way - and that's just as relevant to cities as it is to companies.
Witness, for example, the extraordinary success of the Brazilian city
of Curitiba, which issued points to people for recycling their rubbish
- and which were enthusiastically collected by street children handing
in litter off the streets. The points could be spent during off-peak times
on the buses.
The result: Curitiba is the cleanest city in Latin America, and all paid
for by spare public transport capacity. Ordinary money isn't targeted
enough for that.
But now the city of Rotterdam is poised to launch an even more ambitious
project along the same lines, devised by the Dutch/Scottish currency consultancy
Barataria, and supported by the co-operative Rabobank. Pluspunten (plus
points) will be earned by the cities consumers on a smartcard for green
behaviour - anything from buying eco-label products to recycling.
Barataria's Edgar Kampers has been negotiating with a wide range of big
companies and SMEs - a difficult task because companies will not get the
right to be the only retailer, for example, taking part. So, starting
in March, participants will also be able to spend points buying organic
food, or buying ethical investment products, or separating their waste.
They will be able to spend their points on public transport - as in Curitiba
- or theatre tickets, or sports training, or going to the zoo, or education,
and if they can arrange it, green tourism as well.
The project has been in gestation for almost a decade, but was taken up
by the Dutch environment ministry some years ago, and now it's a joint
venture between Barataria, Rabobank and the City of Rotterdam's departments
of environmental policy, public transport and waste. Pluspunten is just
a working name for the generic title 'sustainable incentive card'.
It's an ambitious two-year project, involving seven full-time staff and
a committee that will consider new products to be included in the whole
process. After a year, they will review progress, and if it's starting
to take off we can expect the idea to spread quickly to other Dutch cities
and probably the rest of Europe.
The idea of giving people a positive incentive to behave in an environmental
manner arose out of discussions about environmental tax return - which
is, after all, just about negative incentives.
It is similar thinking to the time banks that are springing up everywhere
at the moment. The problem for good neighbour behaviour, and green behaviour,
is that it takes extra time - but nobody notices, nobody rewards it and
nobody thanks you.
In a way, time bank experience shows that the rewards aren't that important
- the credits you earn are a recognition of the effort people have made,
and somehow that's enough to keep them doing it. Probably the Pluspunten
project will find something similar - just as the business loyalty programmes
have done: people like to collect the points, even if they never actually
spend them.
Either way, Pluspunten has the ring of the future about it. It isn't enough
to rely on people's conscience to behave in a green way to benefit the
city - because habits are hard to break. You have to measure and reward
their efforts.
But if you can reward them with the city's spare capacity - at theatres
or on the trams - then you are being efficient in a way that simple accountancy
with ordinary money never can.
This isn't to criticise ordinary money. It's just that the feedback it
provides is so wide-ranging, about every kind of industry and consumer
desire, that it can't be brought to bear on a very simple trade-off like
this one.
Nonetheless, economic purists may not like it because it complicates the
balance sheet. Environmental purists may not like it because people should
be behaving like this anyway. Even so, I'm willing to bet that Rotterdam
is going to be a better place to live as a result.
David Boyle's book The Tyranny of Numbers is published in paperback by
Flamingo at £8.99 this month (www .tyrannyofnumbers.co.uk).
