Speaking at the Anglia Region Waste Awareness Campaign (ARWAC) conference in Cambridge this week, Steve Haugh, coordinator of the campaign which comes under the remit of the National Waste Awareness Initiative, explained how the NWAI plans to raise the profile of waste and recycling. He said that the aim is to encourage a positive change in attitudes and behaviour towards rubbish and recycling and NWAI will play a major role in co-ordinating different initiatives.
Mr Haugh said: “We need to promote a consistent message for waste awareness and join up some of the dots between different campaigns in the country including ARWAC. We will support the work that people are doing locally and will also help out in areas where campaigns are not running. ARWAC has shown that you need to have a long-term campaign and that you have to maintain a presence and you can't change people's habits overnight.”
Starting next week, the NWAI is holding a series of briefing events where it will reveal more details about its 2002 campaign as well as its branding – which has been kept under wraps. Slogans that the NWAI have been looking at include – “Reuse, recycling, rethinking your rubbish” and it is thought that the slogan could be a variation on this. The events are taking place on February 25 in London, February 28 in Bristol and March 1 in Leeds.
Roadshow
Mr Haugh explained that this year's campaign will include both a promotional roadshow and a retail initiative. Under the retail initiative, retailers will promote waste awareness issues to their customers. And the NWAI is currently in liaison with individual retailers to discuss the extent of their involvement. The campaign will see promotions taking place in both city centres and out of town shopping centres to reach a target audience of one million consumers. Mr Haugh said that while sensible shopping will be part of this, the campaign will also have a wider focus.
The initiative has received core funding from the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the retail partnership has been funded by Biffaward, CSS, Valpak and the Arcadia group.
The first part of the NWAI's work was to carry out extensive nation-wide research in so that the initiative could assess the level of public knowledge about waste. The results show that the not unsurprisingly, the public does not view waste as a high priority, does not understand the term waste and does not see it as their problem: “I put it in the dustbin and it gets taken away. The council looks after all that.”
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