Overview

Connecting with customers using a 'trashy love story.'

Proper waste disposal is complicated. For Placer County residents, they must manage seven categories of plastics, some recyclable, others not; a wide range of battery types, many with different disposal requirements; a confusing array of household hazardous wastes (HHW), most with environmental and health consequences for improper disposal; as well as a variety of universal waste items with no shared vocabulary and requiring different disposal methods.

Additionally, for WPWMA, proper waste disposal was a matter of safety. It risked cross-contamination of waste that could harm the environment, as well injuring WPWMA’s own collection and sorting teams.

WPWMA asked 3fold to create a multi-faceted outreach campaign to educate and inspire recycling behavior change for all residents, especially those in traditionally underserved neighborhoods.

Approach

We needed to make proper waste disposal relevant to people's lives. We saw a disconnect between existing One Big Bin and HHW recycling messaging and the people it was trying to educate. One of the biggest challenges being: hazardous waste recycling is not interesting to most people.

How do you take a topic many people want to think about and make it relevant to their lives?

3fold built a creative campaign focused on charming and entertaining those most likely to be responsible and care about waste. Using a video-based campaign designed to build an emotional connection with viewers by using animated characters representing a variety of recyclables and having them tell a “Trashy Love Story” that pulled at a universal truth--breaking up is hard.

+12 million

Media impressions, with the ‘Trashy Love Story’ video viewed more than 6,500 times on Facebook alone.

+400%

Increase in website traffic. We also successfully repositioned the website as the informational hub for One Big Bin waste and disposal and boosted

unpaid traffic to this website by four times its original traffic.

 

Let’s talk about your community and how we can help you reach it.

3fold Communications is a community connection marketing agency specializing in recruitment and activation of diverse customers, regions, and influencers.

Let’s talk about your community 
and how we can help you reach it.

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