It’s a well-known fact: if you want to change people’s behaviour, it helps to make a game out of it. This also applies to greening the surroundings of residential houses. Gardens full of paving stones are bad for biodiversity, increase the risk of flooding and further increase the temperature in the already warmer summers.
At the moment, the average garden owner in the Netherlands opts for convenience rather than green. In some cities according to Wageningen University up to 70 percent of the surface is built up and paved. The NK Tegelwippen tries to counter that. Tiles out – grass, flowerbeds and trees in it. And then declare a winner.
What started in 2020 as a battle between Amsterdam and Rotterdam has grown into a national competition. Last year, 81 municipalities already took part in the competition, supported by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. 136 municipalities registered for the last edition, which ran from March to October.
Photo proof
In order for the competition to be fair, participants had to prove with photos which surface they had greened. Clinkers, pebbles and boulders were converted to the standard paving stone format of 30 by 30 centimetres. In total, people removed more than 2.8 million tiles, or about 250,000 square meters of stone – an area the size of 35 football fields. Those who replaced stone not with grass, for example, but with gravel, were allowed to count half of their square meters: no greenery, but good for drainage.
Frenk van Harreveld, professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam, thinks the NK Tegelwippen is ‘a very smart move’. People are more inclined to sustainable behavior when it yields results. In this case, that reward is social. ‘You do it together with others,’ says Van Harreveld. ‘That connects you to your own city or to your own street.’
Moreover, when tiling, participants immediately see the impact of their work. That helps enormously, says Van Harreveld. ‘With environmentally conscious behavior it often feels to people as if they are carrying water to the sea, but here you can see very concretely the number of tiles that have been lifted.’
The Dutch champion, converted to population, is Hollands Kroon. On average, the nearly 50,000 inhabitants of the Noord-Holland municipality removed 3.1 tiles each. In absolute numbers, The Hague removed the most stones: 306 thousand.
One third of the participating municipalities took part in a competition within the competition: a derby in which cities or villages competed against the rival. ‘Amsterdam against Rotterdam is an example’, says initiator Eva Braaksma of campaign agency Frank Lee. ‘But also Maastricht against Sittard. That stirs up the fight.’
The derby that nine municipalities from Twente fought against each other proves that the competition element works. Converted to population, five of them – Oldenzaal, Almelo, Losser, Hengelo and Borne – finished in the national top 10.
Down to own success
Municipalities tried to entice their inhabitants with subsidies or other aid to join the fray. For example, Rotterdam and Waalwijk are using a tile taxi to help residents get rid of their thrown tiles. In the latter municipality, the tile taxi had to drive two extra laps to meet the demand.
The greening that the NK Tile Lights results in must be seen in perspective. About 480 hectares of forest surface disappears in the Netherlands every year, a survey showed last year analysis of Wageningen University, an area almost twenty times the size of the area that the tile wipers jointly made green last year.
As a result, the organization of the competition will not be slowed down: registration for next year is already open. The ultimate goal of the National Championships? Succumb to his own success. ‘Actually, we want the competition to be no longer necessary,’ says Braaksma, ‘because there is no longer any pointless paving in Dutch gardens’.