The Environment Act 1986 established the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), which is the primary adviser of the New Zealand Government on environmental matters. The purpose statement for the MfE is “A flourishing environment for every generation – He taiao tōnui mō ngā reanga katoa [te reo version, the indigenous language of the Māori people].

MfE is actively engaged in reducing waste across the country, as illustrated by the recent Aotearoa New Zealand Waste Strategy. To lead by example, MfE has the responsibility to minimize waste production in its offices, and this includes the volume of paper used. We thus modified default printing options to reduce paper waste and related costs. The default settings were changed to duplex and black-and-white printing across all MfE offices on 30 November 2022.

This project describes the results of a before-after field experiment with changing default as the behavioral intervention and analyzing 2-years of printing behavior. It illustrates how people are affected by a pre-set default option, and how Behavioral Insights is a powerful and cost-effective method to counter status-quo bias — here, the default setting being single-side printing.