ABOUT

THE BRIEF
North London Waste Authority approached Therapy with a brief to get an apathetic-yet-demanding group of young North Londoners [across seven boroughs: Islington, Camden, Waltham Forest, Harringey, Hackney, Barnet and Enfield] to take an interest in recycling.

RESEARCH FINDINGS
Research into recycling awareness and message consumption amongst this group revealed that existing recycling messages weren’t being absorbed because they were tonally detached and contextually irrelevant.

“I see it, I acknowledge it, then it just sort of disappears.”…“The rewards are a bit… I just don’t really think of more park benches as a big plus.”…“It’s for try-hards… green freaks.”

Essentially recycling had become its own worst enemy; it had so often proven itself preachy and boring that it had become a sort of cultural wallpaper.

INSIGHT
To cut through, NLWA would need to dissociate itself from the preachiness and community-do-gooding that had become hallmarks of this category’s messaging. We needed to take a step back and re-connect with young people by stripping away the calcified layers of irrelevance.

THE ESSENCE OF THE THING
So we went back to the beginning and asked ourselves: what is recycling really all about? What is the essence of the thing?

We had a big epiphany: it really doesn’t need to be about global initiatives to save the world or local authority finger wagging or even about propagating the existence of park benches…

It’s just about not throwing away useful stuff.

Now that’s a pretty simple principle to grasp – and a much more motivating proposition: deep down we all love our stuff; it’s part of our identity, it helps us do things we really enjoy… life without our favourite stuff would be decidedly rubbish.

IDEA: SAVE OUR STUFF

Therapy’s solution was to jettison the baggage; to strip away all the boring language and vernacular that had become the category’s downfall and just focus our young consumers on the real challenge: saving our stuff.

Through a series of short videos, Save Our Stuff abandons the Pavolvian switch-off word ‘recycling’ and inspires a new channel of thought by dreaming up a series of quirky dystopias in which European millenials lament living in worlds without recycled materials.

We’ll tell stories around the subsequent missing human benefits to capture the imagination of young consumers in North London.

At the heart of the message is a plea to evoke inherent responsibility – we know millenials don’t want to be ordered around or dictated to so this isn’t a lecture it’s a memorandum: these things are useful; we still need them.

And then there is the subtext (and the vehicle for the fun) around progress: just because things were ‘OK’ in the past, doesn’t mean they need to be accepted now, in this age of post-modern enlightenment. Throwing away useful things might have been acceptable in the past – but then so were hairy jumpers, ugly wooden shoes, and hats made from animals.