What’s In Your Bin? campaign - Timaru District Council
Contracted by Timaru District Council, Priority Communications helped develop and implement a major public awareness campaign to reduce the amount of rubbish being put in recycling bins.
Within six months of starting the campaign, there was a 24 per cent improvement in recycling habits in the Timaru District. The What’s In Your Bin? campaign was credited with playing a major role in this success.
2022 Silver Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) Award, Consumer or Customer Relations Category
2022 Judges’ Commendation, Sustainable Business Awards, Communicating for Impact Category
What we did
When Priority Communications was first approached by Timaru District Council, there were significant issues with local residents struggling to sort their recycling and waste correctly. These ranged from Council staff handling highly contaminated recycling, to the district’s landfill expiring at a much faster rate than predicted.
Knowing that Timaru residents had once been champion recyclers, we supported the Council in taking an education-based approach and used a humorous and slightly saucy approach to draw people into the messaging.
We worked closely with the Council’s waste recovery and communications teams to create What’s In Your Bin?, a highly engaging campaign to change residents’ behaviour that received strong national and local media coverage.
The campaign involved elected members of the Council and several other high-profile Timaru people including popular actor and comedian, Josh Thomson. It ran for several months across the district, encompassing social media, news coverage, billboards, video, web content, district-wide mailouts, and radio advertising.
Services our team provided included: digital marketing, strategic communications, media relations, social media, advertising, videography, animation, and photography.
