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Shanks East London
The issue: Contamination - or putting the wrong things in your recycling bin or box - is a major issue for councils. It prevents things from being recycled, affects the quality of materials recycled and makes collection and sorting more expensive.
The challenge: Waste and resource management company, Shanks, asked Waste Watch to run a pilot communications campaign to reduce contamination in two recycling collection rounds in the London boroughs of Havering and Barking and Dagenham. The aim was to tailor the communications approach for each so the campaign had the greatest impact on public behaviour in reducing recycling contamination.
Our approach: Our teams worked with Shanks' collection crews over six weeks to monitor the recycling behaviour of each household on their routes. Waste Watch wrote and designed information leaflets, bin stickers and letters for residents who were contaminating their recycling, explaining what materials they should recycle and why not recycling the right things is an issue for the council. The messages became progressively more serious in tone if recycling continued to be contaminated over the six week period. We conducted a face to face doorstepping campaign to engage directly with residents and educate them about contamination; and delivered training to collection crews.
The results: Levels of contamination fell dramatically in both areas - from 14.7% to 1.0% in Havering and from 17.9% to 6.9% in Barking and Dagenham. This means more waste was recycled, it was cheaper for the council to process and the quality of recycled material at the end had improved.
"Waste Watch's targeted approach really paid off in both areas - we were really pleased with the results this campaign achieved".
David Healy, Shanks East London
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