Some Things Just Don't Go Together
For National Clean-Up & Recycle Week, we helped Mpact Recycling turn a practical recycling message into entertaining social content. By using comedians, terrible food combinations and a simple analogy, we showed consumers why recyclables and non-recyclables should be kept apart.
Recycling depends on separation. When recyclable materials are mixed with non-recyclables, food waste, water or other contaminants, their value drops and they become harder to process. For Mpact Recycling, Clean-Up & Recycle Week was an opportunity to make this message more memorable for consumers and collectors.
But contamination is not an easy subject to make interesting. So we avoided the usual guilt-heavy recycling message and turned a technical problem into a simple social idea: some things just don’t go together. We created a social campaign for National Clean-Up & Recycle Week built around that simple idea. The campaign featured comedians being presented with terrible food combinations — the kind of pairings that should never share a plate. These reactions became an entertaining analogy for contamination in recycling.
Each piece of content linked a bad food combination to a bad recycling combination, helping people understand why rocks, metal, water, plastic liners, polystyrene and other contaminants should be kept out of recyclable material.
The result was a campaign that made a technical recycling message more human, more memorable and far more shareable, with close to 3 million views on Facebook during Clean Up and Recycle Week.