Westco have produced numerous campaigns for Westminster’s Waste and Recycling team over the years, from fly tipping campaigns to food waste projects. In 2020, Westminster commissioned a report that showed that many residents were still confused about what should be recycled and were throwing away tonnes of recyclable packaging at home. In most cases the packaging was clearly marked as recyclable, but residents were simply not checking first.
As Westminster has a large transient population, many who are new to the country, it is understandable that residents might not be aware of the recycling symbols or what they mean.
We created a social media campaign using the line ‘Check before you chuck’, to encourage and remind people to see if a piece of packaging was recyclable before putting it in the bin. We wrote the alliteration into the line to take advantage of the ‘rhyme as reason’ behavioural heuristic.
The designs featured stylized renderings of popularly discarded food packaging with the recycling information re-written in a more engaging way. By using these recycling labels as part of the creative execution to contain some of the concept’s information, we re-enforce the behaviour of reading them. The lines used humour and simple English to make the information memorable and easy to understand.
We used computer generated illustrations to create generic versions of popular food packaging, as we felt photography may distract people into thinking we were only talking about specific brands.
We created static executions and a number of animations that could be shared individually or as one full-length piece of content. These were run across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in organic and targeted paid posts.
Early in the campaign, we generated specific Easter egg executions in time for the Easter Weekend, which thanks to Easter Egg packaging, usually sees a spike in unrecycled waste.
‘Check before you chuck’ was used as a hashtag on communications and there was a link to a Westminster website page that gave more information about the issue as well as what and how to recycle more.
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