On September 22,2023, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development successfully hosted the first session of the Fall 2023 Reading Club.The keynote speaker for this event was Assistant Professor Pan Yuhang from Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development.

The article presented in this event is a publication authored by Pan Yuhang and his colleagues in the year 2023, which was featured in the esteemed journal Science. The article is titled ' Reducing single-use cutlery with green nudges: Evidence from China’s food-delivery industry'. The abstract of the article is provided below: Rising consumer demand for online food delivery has increased the consumption of disposable cutlery, leading to plastic pollution worldwide. In this work, we investigate the impact of green nudges on single-use cutlery consumption in China. In collaboration with Alibaba’s food-delivery platform, Eleme (which is similar to Uber Eats and DoorDash), we analyzed detailed customer-level data and found that the green nudges—changing the default to “no cutlery” and rewarding consumers with “green points”—increased the share of no-cutlery orders by 648%. The environmental benefits are sizable: If green nudges were applied to all of China, more than 21.75 billion sets of single-use cutlery could be saved annually, equivalent to preventing the generation of 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste and saving 5.44 million trees.

Source：Guojun He et al. ,Reducing single-use cutlery with green nudges: Evidence from China’s food-delivery industry.Science381,eadd9884(2023).DOI:10.1126/science.add9884 

（By Zhang Huyang）