Insight

Whilst WRAP evidence shows almost everyone recycles, recycling rates in England have plateaued with uncertainty around what’s allowed and doubts about whether it’s worthwhile. To tackle missed capture (that is items being put in the bin that could be recycled) we need to be specific about what people need to do. 

Recycle Week 2024 brought 5 commonly binned recyclable items to life by giving them personalities and stories. This approach used anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things - transforming these household items into adorable characters people care about (even though rationally we know they are inanimate objects). By sharing their stories and dreams of being recycled into something new, we encouraged people to rescue them from the bin and recycle them instead. 

To reinforce the message, the campaign engaged the public through various challenges - including leveraging ‘pester power’ by educating children on the recyclable items adults in their household might be throwing in the bin.

Intervention

As part of a community intervention for this campaign, we developed the idea of a ‘Workshop in a Box’, designed to have everything needed to pull off an engaging and fun recycling workshop for children. The objective of the workshop was to give children confidence to speak up at home about recycling - so we needed the workshop to be memorable enough to talk about at home and include an element that parents or guardians could get involved with. 

Workshop in a Box includes:

• The Rescue Me Game: a board game designed created from scratch with a bespoke pack of 32 cards full of positive or negative things that can happen to your item on its journey to being recycled. You can learn more about how to play in our blog here. 

• Fact sheets: Stories about each character with facts weaved into them to learn from. With recycling experts we created child-friendly questions about the items such as what the item could be recycled into or what material the item is made of. 

• The Games Leader sheet: A specially created sheet for the Games Leader with child-friendly instructions. This adds diversity to the roles you can play in the game, ensuring no child is left out. 
• Activity sheets: To introduce the characters to the children and give them opportunities to have even more fun in class whilst still learning. 
• The Rescue Log and Sticker Sheet: Aimed to encourage children to hunt for the 5 recyclable items around their home (with an adult) and stick a ‘Rescue Me’ sticker on them. 

Implementation

We successfully distributed 100 physical boxes to schools and local authorities throughout the UK. The boxes were shipped to arrive at the beginning of Recycle Week. 

The boxes were designed for repeated use, so recipients were able to share a box with various different schools, classes and children’s clubs. 

After the 100 physical boxes were distributed, we made a downloadable version of our workshop available which could be printed out and utilised by anyone. This is available here. 

Impact

"A fantastic learning tool which brings a new dimension to learning about recycling. Well done!"

To measure the impact of our boxes, a survey was distributed to all recipients of the box. The workshop was used by a range of age groups from year 3 - 6. Workshop leaders reported children engaging in multiple activities, including using the rescue log at home and speaking up about recycling. 

Most workshop leaders felt the workshop exceeded their expectations and were confident they would run the workshop again, with some already having future sessions lined up.

“Children discussed it outside of guiding and we had lots of parents get in touch to ask questions! Lots of positive feedback.”

Most workshop leaders felt the workshop exceeded their expectations and were confident they would run the workshop again, with some already having future sessions lined up.

All children reported being engaged in our workshop, and we received positive feedback from the children about the challenges being “exciting” and the game being “colourful” and “funny”.

We’re now looking at opportunities to roll out this intervention at a bigger scale.