Autumn launch for National Waste Awareness campaign

The campaign aims to cover England and Wales with a separate scheme being organised for Scotland.
Barbara Herridge, executive director of Waste Watch, has been responsible for setting up the NWAI as a limited company with charitable aims.

There has been some concern recently within senior local government circles at delays in getting the project underway. Ms Herridge explained that while one of the reasons for this was that she had moved across from organising the NWAI to heading up Waste Watch, “fund raising had taken time”.

“We have now been awarded a 67,000 grant from the DETR and are receiving funding of 500,000 from Biffaward.”
But, many people in the waste sector and local government consider that funding for the project will be inadequate unless more funding is made available, either from government or from the waste sector under the Landfill Tax Credits Scheme.

The NWAI toolkit will centre on a brand campaign approach that can be offered for use nationally, regionally and locally, Ms Herridge explained. There will be no cuddly animals promoting NWAI. Instead the campaign will be very focused following a considerable amount of research has been undertaken into public attitudes and this will be published shortly. One finding is that the word waste is not the best term to use, and so the focus will be on household “rubbish” with a special emphasis on waste reduction. The likely slogan for the campaign is: “reduce, re-use, recycle.”

The need to ensure that campaigns in the waste sector are properly organised was highlighted by Ray Georgeson, policy director of WRAP – the Waste and Resources Action Programme – last week. Speaking at the Community Recycling Network conference last week, Mr Georgeson, spoke about some of the difficulties of mounting a Buy Recycled campaign. He pointed out that there are not enough recycled products in the marketplace to underpin campaigns to get people to buy products with a recycled content. He said: “The problem with “Buy Recycled” is that the products are not on the market to buy. Toilet paper and stationery are simply not enough.”