Chua Hua Ren, Lim Kai Jun Melanie, Low Jia Chen, Ng Hong Quan
Academic Advisor: Ms. Sadaf Ansari
The trend in using liquid soaps over bar soaps (Willingham, 2016) is harming the Earth increasingly as experts cite facts on how damaging liquid soap is through greater carbon footprint incurred and larger amount of waste generated (HKFP, 2016 & Drahl, 2018). Being a strategic platform for building a sustainable campus, NUS offers great opportunities for students to share their constructive inputs to our project. Our project explored the perception of NUS Residential College students and their awareness of the environmental costs of liquid soaps. We also tested if students could be encouraged to use bar soaps through the design and installation of a soap dispenser prototype, to ultimately encourage the switch to bar soaps use.
We chose RVRC as our test-bed. Qualitative surveys were carried out before and after the installation of our prototype to measure the change in attitudes of residents in using bar soaps. The results indicate that the majority of residents are aware of the adverse environmental impacts of using liquid soaps. The residents also highlighted convenience and hygiene as their main concerns for their continued preference of using liquid soap. Our data also indicated that most respondents were willing to switch to bar soaps if the prototype could address their concerns. We have recommend a more extensive pilot testing of the bar soap dispenser in RVRC, with OHS collaboration, to measure the impact of our idea in nudging residents to using bar soap as a sustainable alternative to liquid soap.
Keywords: Responsible Consumption