Habit formation is the process by which a new behavior becomes habitual and situations or cues trigger the action automatically. The habit formation theory postulates that habitual tendencies will tend to become stronger than motivational tendencies. Support for this has been found for health-related behaviors but it can also be easily applied to conservation issues.
Habit formation has been shown to be very important for the plastic waste problem. Despite the high awareness of the problem, usage rates of plastic products are still generally high. Even when customers are willing to reduce their plastic consumption, they fail when trying to change their habits. The plastic bag ban is viewed positively by the public, but people find it difficult to remember to bring their own bags. This results in them still buying the plastic ones.
The habits are also enforced because of the advantages of plastic. Plastic bags can still be bought for a very low price, which does not really help in changing the pay-off scheme for the customer. Additional to the low price, people also always emphasize the convenience and the easy availability of plastic as a material. This makes the habit of buying and using plastic products still very advantageous for the customer.
All of these factors make it difficult to change people’s habits. It is clear that interventions need to take the habit formation components into account if they want to induce behavioral change. Policies need to aim at establishing learned context-action associations that result in automatically cued behavior. “Bad” habits need to be changed into “good” habits.