UBC Undergraduate Research

An investigation into UBC sustainable swag Wu, Simon; Liu, Michael; Kung, Anson; Naghavi, Pirouz; Lee, Jonathan

Abstract

In previous years, the UBC Sustainability Initiative (USI) has participated in various campus-wide events such as Imagine Day, wherein various campus organizations promote themselves to students. One of the typical marketing strategies at these events is the act of handing out swag, a practice the USI participated in. However, concern was raised as to whether the swag being used by the USI was appropriate for the message of the organization, as previously used swag items were either overly expensive or lacking clarity with respect to the environmental impact of their fabrication. In light of this issue, the USI requested student groups of the APSC 262 course to perform an investigative analysis of sustainable swag. It was requested that this analysis remain primarily focused on literature, as the USI was conducting its own conversation with various swag providers and wished to avoid possible misunderstandings should the student groups contact the same companies by mistake. The desired end result of this analysis was to produce a method to quickly evaluate potential swag items with respect to Triple Bottom Line (TBL) accounting and a recommendation for potential swag items or marketing techniques the USI could use in the future. To address these issues and arrive at potential solutions, the team performed a literature review on the separate topics of the effectiveness of swag as marketing, the sustainability practices of suppliers, and various decision making processes. From this research, the team was able to develop a framework for swag TBL assessment, which evaluates items based on the labour practices in the country of manufacture, the carbon impact of the materials used, and the per-unit cost of the item. The team also came up with three potential swag item recommendations for the USI, and would recommend the USI to consider alternative marketing methods in addition to the use of swag. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada