Ansa
Creating sustainable regions
Creating sustainable regions
Helping Cheshire East Council deliver a resident recycling initiative across the region. Working with ANSA, waste, and recycling services to drive awareness of correct recycling procedures and encourage more environmentally friendly behaviours.
Challenge
Challenge
Ansa delivers waste and recycling services for Cheshire East Council, along with grounds maintenance, fleet services and street cleansing functions. Through the collection of bins and managing household recycling centres, Ansa identified a growing waste management issue across the borough – the inclusion of unwanted items and black bin bags, within recycling bins.
At the time, the onus on recycling as an obligation over a nice to have, was relatively new. The problem was not that people didn’t recycle but were doing so incorrectly. Our challenge was to engage residents to recycle correctly whilst not deterring them from the great commitment already made. Furthermore, by making it easier for residents to recycle, there was an opportunity to drive more environmentally friendly behaviours throughout the borough.
Collaborate
Collaborate
In order to tackle this, we worked closely with the client to devise a simple but effective multi-channel campaign. To engage diverse groups of residents across Cheshire East the message needed to remain simple and easy to understand. Rather than shame residents through the use of technical data or the consequences of contamination – we wanted to celebrate the positive behaviours of the region whilst keeping residents informed on progress. It was also important to choose effective channels of communication which would cater to all audience types, both online and offline.
Create
Create
‘Leave it Loose’ was a simple, impactful and effective programme identity, creating an easy to remember banner for which to tackle contaminated waste. It targeted 165,000 households via a suite of collateral as well as multi-channel dissemination including leaflets, banner stands, bin stickers, digital graphics, bin wagon graphics). We also drove a dedicated hashtag on Twitter to raise awareness.
Change
Change
The programme resulted in a significant change in recycling habits with the average contamination rate for the seven months of monitoring dropping from 21.68% to 8.51%. The lowest contamination rate recorded was 1.64% in one month. An added benefit of the campaign was that the overall recycling rate also increased from 54% to 57% across the borough.
