1. City of Sydney’s Zero Waste Initiative Presented by Andrea Barnetche 12 November 2009
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3. What is Zero Waste? “ reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill, promote waste avoidance, reuse, and recycling ” City of Sydney’s ‘flagship’ waste campaign that aims to:
4. Zero Waste is the public campaign for the City of Sydney Draft Waste Management Strategy Low-waste community by 2014 INFRASTRUCTURE (The Foundations) SERVICES (The Coalface) EDUCATION (The knowledge and power) ECONOMIC (The Wallet) REGULATION (The Stick) POLICY (The Rules) COMMUNICATION (The hook) Engaging, empowering, and supporting communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours
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8. Waste Behaviours of Target Audience Strongs Moderates Limiteds Avoid Reuse Recycle Recover Disposal High concern, dominant pro-environmental views. Committed to doing “ the right thing” Image conscious, motivated by personal benefit, popular views and free, easy actions. Low awareness and concern. Survival is a priority. Skeptical about effectiveness of individual action
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10. Official Website Link to information on new bins for residents ‘Real time’ counter for Kg of rubbish diverted from landfill by City of Sydney residents. Link to information about urban sustainability workshops Recycling Quiz (also Provides information on alternative waste options)
Zero Waste is the public face of the City of Sydney’s Draft Waste Management Strategy What you see here is a schematic showcasing the different branches of the strategy. What we are most interested in are these: education and communication, whose main strategy is….CLICK
The city of Sydney aims to reduce waste by a certain percentage every year. Waste is a valuable resource- which has actually become one of the campaign slogans Link to other environmental issues by showing impacts on climate change and water- more easily understandable concepts for some groups.
Current resource recovery rate is 32%. Although issue awareness is an objective of zero waste, behaviour change is the main goal.
This slide shows the waste hierarchy in conjunction with the zero waste target audience categories The strong group tend to have high concern for the environment, dominant pro-environmental views, and a personal sense of responsibility to “do the right thing”. They typically are not concerned with cost, they believe that individuals can make a collective difference Moderates tend to be motivated by social pressure to be environmentally aware and engage in green behaviour. Cost and inconvenience are barriers to behaviour change in this group and they tend to believe that industry is the main cause of environmental problems. Limiteds show low concern for the environment, and are skeptical about the effectiveness of individual action. Cost is a big barrier for them, and the environment is not a top priority.
Zero Waste is a multi-dimensional campaign with several different program components . We unfortunately cannot get into every program, so we will focus on these three.
Official website for zero waste is the face of the campaign. It is designed to be easily navigated and accessible to a wide audience The content reflects the most common topics that people search for on the City’s website It’s designed to look more dynamic and is updated weekly
The media marketing campaign is composed of print and online ads.
Zero Waste also places banner ads on several websites, including the Sydney Morning Herald online news server ( www.smh.com.au ), as well as in magazines and newspapers. This includes ‘Think before you bin it’, as well as other brand ads. (‘Think before you toss it’- cigarettes). Although the online media, and print ads can be accessed anywhere, the outdoor media ads, workshops, and other program components are only located within the city centre.
Even though it is not one of the three major programs, I wanted to talk about the banner reuse project because I think it shows the council leading by example with a creative way of reusing waste. The banner reuse project through reverse garbage turns old City of Sydney banners into bags, stuffed animals, and clothing, which is given away to community members at public events.
There are also several free workshops put on for the community. Through the Urban Sustainability Workshop series, residents are encouraged to divert organic waste from landfill through free monthly composting and worm farming workshops, where participants receive a free compost bin or worm farm to take home.
We will now talk about the steps that went into the program planning stage for zero waste
Findings from Who Cares 2006 were used to develop communications strategies, and appropriate communications channels for the target audience Behaviour change theory was used to understand the motivations behind behaviour change The information allowed zero waste to target specific projects at target audiences, and allowed them to better predict probable behaviour changes
Keep it personal Messages and behaviours should be relevant to individuals. Communications will be conversational, and addressed to the individual Send the right message Make clear and direct requests that will help reach objectives (to get people to avoid/reduce, reuse, recycle). Key messages will be repeated often to create brand awareness for the campaign Empathy and imagination Show how waste issues have had an impact on people/communities/animals Use more visuals, less words. Create a strong visual strategy and cut down on words. Community feedback Let people know the progress they have made, thank people for their efforts Feedback reduces anxiety, helps reinforce behaviour and increases the belief that action makes a differ ence Maintain positive attitudes The campaign will not rely on doom and gloom waste reporting, instead the focus will be on possible solutions, and steps people can realistically take to make a difference
The creators of zero waste didn’t want the message to exist in isolation so part of the strategy was to incorporate the key ideas with messages about sustainable development, and a link to Sustainable Sydney 2030. The communications plan includes provisions for internal and external feedback throuhout the life of the campaign Key messages and slogans of the campaign, including ‘think before you bin it’, as well as the consistent color scheme both help with brand recognition.
IN the development of the Waste management strategy, the city of Sydney undertook an extensive community consulation to determine what kind of waste campaign should be developped. The results of the community consulation included: More face to face communication (such as workshops, and presence at events) Increased infrastructure and services (more bins, and variety of bins) More visual information Information on waste management that can be found online And a greater focus on illegal dumping, cigarette butt littering, and food waste
We will now move on to the zero waste program evaluation phase, and discuss evaluation taken place by the zero waste campaign
Most of the evaluation thus far has been indirect and has included: Attendance patterns at programs and events (demographics, volume, etc) Web traffic statistics, including number of website hits, length of time on each page, number of links clicked on, etc And the number of workshop participants
Direct evaluation of the zero waste campaign to date has included data collected from: workshop questionnaires Community consultation And feedback from workshop and even attendees (interview and informal dialogue)
The overall effectiveness of the campaign is measured quantitatively, by the annual tonnages of waste diverted from lanfill. Increases in the amount of waste recycled is also used to judge the effectiveness of the campaign Although I did not have access to the financial data, I was assured that the program is very good value for money Because: a lot of the work is done internally (website creation and maintenance, photos, promotional videos event materials, etc)
The following are recommendations for the future of the zero waste program
For program content, there should be: an increased program focus on food waste and food composting. Unless people have compost bins or worm farms, much of that organic waste is being sent to landfill, when it could be picked up easily with the garden waste. The community consultation indicated that food waste was an issue of concern, but other than worm farm and composting workshops, nothing really has been done about it. There are no public recycling bins in the city of Sydney., or any provisions for event recycling. This needs to be fixed because it sets a bad example and precedent by asking residents to recycle in their own homes but not in public. The website is creative and user-friendly, but there could be a waste calculator, or landfill footprint calculator to help people better understand their personal impact.
Zero waste is a very young program- only launched in mid-2008. Although data has been collected, tehre has not been a formal evaluation done to date. In addition, no research has been done into the effectiveness of brand or issue awarenes by the campaign. Social maketing awareness and behavioural research is planned for early next year to evaluate the effectiveness of zero waste Lastly, zero waste should be requesting more consistent feedback on campaign issues, and personale effectiveness of the projects (resident surveys, or questionnaires on the website for example)
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