A study from the University of Hong Kong has found that simple encouragement — or “green nudges” — from food delivery platforms can reduce the use of single-use plastic cutlery by customers, and subsequently, cut plastic waste dramatically.

The new study examined how food delivery platforms could potentially change consumer behavior with so-called green nudges. Working with the China-based food ordering platform Eleme, the researchers changed the default selection concerning cutlery requests to “no cutlery.”

Further, the researchers awarded consumers “green points’ whenever they selected no cutlery. According to the researchers, once a customer accumulated enough green points, they could be redeemed to plant a tree in the customer’s name.

Looking at the monthly food-ordering history from 2019 to 2020 in 10 Chinese cities — three cities using the green nudge incentive and seven control cities that did not — the authors determined that changing the default to “no cutlery” and offering green points increased no-cutlery orders by roughly 648%.

An article detailing the findings, “Reducing single-use cutlery with green nudges: Evidence from China’s food-delivery industry,” appears in the journal Science.