How a Tokyo Science Museum Used Behavioural Science to Change Its Own Staff’s Habits

Miraikan ran a four-month campaign to encourage employees to swap disposables for reusables. Here’s what they learned about making sustainability behaviour change actually work.

When sustainability teams think about who they need to reach, visitors are usually the obvious answer. But at Miraikan, The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, the sustainability promotion team came to a different conclusion: before you can credibly ask the world to change, you have to start closer to home.

The result was an internal campaign, running from March to June 2025, that asked not visitors but Miraikan’s own employees to rethink their relationship with disposable cups, bottles, chopsticks, and cutlery. It’s a deceptively simple idea, and the way the team approached it — rigorously, realistically, and with a healthy dose of fun — offers a model worth looking at carefully.

Starting with the Science

Miraikan is, of course, a science museum, and the campaign team was determined to honour that identity. Rather than jumping straight to posters and pledges, the team began with a literature review, drawing on a Dutch coursebook used for training people to design and deliver energy savings campaigns. Its worksheets allowed them to rank different behaviour-change measures — knowledge dissemination, rule-setting, modelling, providing feedback — by their expected effectiveness for a specific audience.

That audience mattered enormously. The campaign wasn’t aimed at a general public with unknown habits and attitudes. It was aimed at colleagues: people with defined routines, workplace constraints, and the particular social dynamics of a shared organisation.

Before designing a single campaign element, the team ran a questionnaire to understand where their colleagues actually stood.

What the Data Revealed

The results were instructive, and in some cases surprising. A large majority of staff were already using reusable bottles or cups — 84% said they did so sometimes or frequently. Reusable bags were also reasonably popular. But disposable chopsticks and cutlery told a different story: 76% of respondents said they used these frequently or sometimes.

The reason wasn’t hard to find. Japan’s convenience stores are omnipresent, and their pre-packed lunches — typically warm meals rather than the sandwiches more common in Northern Europe — almost always come with disposable chopsticks, often handed over before a customer has a chance to decline. Good hospitality, in this context, works against sustainability.

When the team asked colleagues what changes felt genuinely achievable, making their own lunch from scratch was not popular. But switching to reusable chopsticks or cutlery was considered doable by 42% of respondents, and increasing reusable cup and bottle use came in at 38%.

This data did two things: it told the team where to focus, and it gave them realistic grounds on which to set goals. Drawing on their source material’s guidance that most behaviour-change measures could achieve around 5–10% change, they set targets accordingly — reducing frequent disposable chopstick use from 43% to 35%, and increasing reusable cup and bottle use from 84% to 90%.

The Campaign in Practice

Armed with both the science and the data, the team designed a set of activities spanning the full four months.
Three posters formed the backbone of the campaign, displayed in the eating space, the kitchenette, and a key corridor. The first offered context: data showing that around three-quarters of household waste in Japan consists of disposable items, and that colleagues themselves had said they felt ready to use more reusables. The second tackled a widespread misconception — that disposable chopsticks are sustainable because they come from Japanese forests. In fact, 98% are imported. The third used a lifecycle assessment comparing reusable bottles against disposable cups, cans, and PET bottles, showing that the CO₂ advantage of reusables compounds significantly with repeated use.

Each poster combined factual information with encouragement and practical tips: let reusable chopsticks air-dry rather than using paper towels; cold water dispensers are available on-site; freshly-made coffee in your own cup tastes considerably better than the pre-packed alternative.

A kickoff lecture introduced the campaign and its content to the whole team, accessible both in person and online. For the thirteen weeks of the campaign, a new message appeared each week on Slack, the museum’s internal messaging platform, covering everything from additional data to nudges about bringing a cup to the nearby coffee shop.

The team also addressed a practical barrier that often goes unacknowledged: nobody wants to wash their things in a dirty sink. Signs at the kitchenette and eating space established hygiene rules — rinse dishes before using the sponge, rinse the sponge afterwards, wipe stains immediately. Small interventions, but ones that reduce a real friction point.

The Fun Parts Matter

Two of the campaign’s most effective elements were also its most enjoyable, and the team believes this is not coincidental. Modelling and demonstrating the desired behaviour sits at the higher end of the effectiveness scale in the behaviour-change literature — and the tea-time event put this principle directly into practice.

Every other week during lunch, colleagues were invited to bring a reusable cup and share freshly-brewed tea together. The format was simple and the uptake was warm. Colleagues started asking when the next session would be, and whether it would continue after the campaign ended. Crucially, it was open to everyone: those who already brought their own cup and those who didn’t, with shared cups available from the eating-space cabinet for anyone who wanted to try.

A chopsticks competition at the campaign’s close invited participants to move as many raw rice grains as possible between bowls in a minute using only their own chopsticks. The event was genuinely fun for those who attended — though it was less successful at driving participation than the tea-times had been, and on the day, nobody actually brought their own chopsticks, requiring the campaign team to step in with a spare pair.

It’s an honest detail, and the team didn’t shy away from it in their evaluation. The lesson they drew: announcing an event through posters and Slack may not be sufficient mobilisation for something that requires advance preparation from participants.

Did It Work?

The post-campaign questionnaire showed mixed but genuinely meaningful results. The share of frequent disposable chopstick and cutlery users fell from 43% to 35% — exactly on target. Reusable cup and bottle use held at 85%, just below the 90% goal, but when respondents were asked what they had started doing or doing more since the campaign began, the single most common answer was using reusable cups and bottles more. Usage frequency may have increased even where the headline percentage didn’t.

Across the campaign’s broader awareness goal, 67.5% of respondents reported having started or increased at least one measure to reduce single-use items — including behaviours the campaign hadn’t directly targeted, such as using reusable bags and making their own lunch.

The team is clear-eyed about the limitations of the evaluation: the post-campaign respondent pool was roughly half the size of the pre-campaign one, and may not have included the same individuals. But they also argue, persuasively, that using a questionnaire at all makes the evaluation considerably stronger than relying on impression alone.

The Broader Lesson

Looking back, Serah Hoeks, who led the campaign, identifies a tendency she sees in sustainability work more broadly: the pull towards idealism, towards pushing ahead without fully reckoning with what’s practical or what people are actually ready for. That pull can result in campaigns that miss the point, alienate the audience, or simply choose the wrong methods.

The antidote, as Miraikan practised it, involves three things: grounding decisions in evidence about how behaviour actually changes; being realistic about what colleagues can and will do, and what a small team can deliver; and finding ways to make the whole thing genuinely enjoyable rather than merely dutiful.

The specific challenge of reducing disposables may be more or less relevant depending on where you are in the world. But the approach — scientific, feasible, and fun — translates anywhere a museum or cultural institution wants to bring its own people along on a sustainability journey, rather than simply directing them from above.

Serah Hoeks presented this work at the Green Museums Summit 2026. She works in the sustainability promotion team at Miraikan, The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, Japan.