Grass clippings left in roadways clog stormdrains, lead to flooding, end up in waterways, and cause algal blooms and fish kills

Grass clippings left in roadways clog stormdrains, lead to flooding, end up in waterways, and cause algal blooms and fish kills.

Landscape Professionals

Encourage people to stop leaving grass clippings in the roadways and keep grass clippings out of stormdrains.

Beg. If you tell them, they will change. Tell professionals to blow clippings back onto yards. Assume that they are to blame since mowing is what they do all day. Tell them that they are harming the environment in a disastrous way and leaving it worse for their children.

Research revealed that the number one reason landscape professionals might keep grass clippings off the road is how they look professionally if they leave a mess. Their top concern was appearing professional in the eyes of others. The least encouraging motivator to them? The environment! Missing these key behavioral motivators could have been very costly for the ACEPD. It would have been a big mistake to run a campaign entirely focused on environmental impacts when that was the least important benefit for landscapers. UC still relayed ACEPD’s important environmental message, but got the target audience’s attention with the motivator they cared about most – being seen as a professional.

In addition, landscape professionals disclosed that they only forget to clean up their grass clippings on very rare occasions. They pointed the finger at residents and, more surprisingly, County maintenance staff attending to the highways and roadways. They cited crews and locations where they had seen grass clippings left after the County finished roadside maintenance. Their opinion was, “If the County isn’t even cleaning up their grass clippings, why should we?”  Good point! The landscapers were not aware of the processes and procedures of the County’s mowing and clean up. Street sweeper trucks are scheduled to clean the grass clippings and other debris after County mowing crews. But often times there would be a significant time delay between the mowing and the street sweeping. This left observant professional landscapers to believe the job was not being done right, which discouraged them from being too enthusiastic to adopt the desired behavior themselves. To overcome this barrier, UC designed program messaging to be placed alongside the County roadside maintenance staff. Why spend money on a newspaper ad or a brochure when our landscapers told us how closely they were watching County crews? Our focus groups were buzzing with names of roads and highways where they knew they would see County mowing staff. So, that’s where we placed our messaging.

UC produced yard signs to be placed out after the crews finished mowing, but before the street sweepers arrived. They said, “Grass clippings are litter and will be removed ASAP.” This helped ensure that the professionals watching knew that the County crews were doing the right thing and leading the way in, “Keeping Grass Off the Streets.” Assumptions-based programming might have spent that money on billboards when the majority of our target audience was looking at County Landscaping Crews and misinterpreting their behaviors.

UC also created an animated commercial and humorous radio ad encouraging landscapers to keep grass off the streets. In an expertly negotiated media buy, we focused heavily on early morning weather and news programming for TV and the top three music stations in the market since these were the top outlets for the landscape professionals. From meeting with them in focus groups, we learned that they often watched early morning weather programming to learn the day’s forecast and plan their day; and during the day, they listened to 103.7, 92.5 and 93.7 radio.

A program pre- and posttest were conducted with a small sample of landscapers in 2011:

• There was a 571% increase in the agreement to the statement, “Grass clippings left in the road will eventually end up in the closest body of water.” (pretest 7% strongly agree, posttest 47% strongly agree)
• Seven out of ten respondents (69%) who saw the campaign said they have been more careful to keep clippings out of the roadways since seeing the campaign.
• In both the pretest and the posttest, most respondents reported that they, “blow clippings back into the yard” most often over all other choices. The frequency in which they reported “always” engaging in this behavior increased substantially (79%) from the pretest to the posttest.
• Around six out of ten (63%) respondents believe that they can receive a ticket from Alachua County for leaving clippings in the road, up 75% from the 36% who believed they would get a ticket in the pretest.
• There was a 21% decrease in agreement with the statement, “Grass clippings are biodegradable, so it’s fine to leave them in the street.”
• There was an 86% increase in agreement with the statement, “Clippings left in the road can harm local lakes, rivers and creeks.” (pretest 29% strongly agree, posttest 54% strongly agree)

Additional evaluation measures were included in a 2011 Alachua County resident survey. We continue to monitor the campaign in subsequent years as part of our ongoing yearly data collection and evaluation. Significant findings are as follows:

• 43% Identified grass clippings a pollutants that should be kept off roads and out of storm drains.
  • (31% 2014, 53% 2015, 58% 2016)
• 71% said they never leave clippings in the road when they mow.
  • (63% in 2014, 62% in 2015, 77% in 2016)
• 91% said they never blow clippings that land in the road toward a storm drain.

(83% in 2014, 72% in 2015, 84% in 2016)