Litter is an on-going and stubborn problem.
Polling by Hubbub UK (2016) revealed that 86%1 of the public believe that dropping litter is an anti-social behaviour, yet litter levels have not dropped in the last 12 years. Last year, clearing up litter cost local authorities across England £682 million2.
Love Your Forest is a collaborative project created in 2016 by Hubbub UK and funded by Lucozade Ribena Suntory. It has been running for three consecutive years in collaboration with the Forest of Dean District Council, Forestry Commission, Foresters’ Forest and Wye Valley and Forest of Dean Tourism.
Each year 250 tonnes of litter are removed from the Forest of Dean. The cost to local taxpayers for keeping the area clean is over £430,000. Love Your Forest was designed to reduce littering in the Forest of Dean by actively engaging with the local community to test a wide range of new approaches to raise awareness on the issue of rural littering.
Following initial research and local consultations, a series of innovative interventions were developed to target litter hotspots, roadside littering, littering in towns and on trails in the forest. These elements aimed to target the whole community, including school children, families, cyclists, motorists, and anyone who uses forestry sites.
They have included creating the UK’s first litter shop, a touring ‘Trashconverter’ inviting people to swap their trash for treats, showcasing art installations in the forest, trialling reusable picnic products, delivering educational programmes in schools and targeting specific audiences such as motorists, mountain bikers and scouting groups.
The campaign generated a high level of local engagement. 30 organisations contributed to the initial stakeholder discussions, 14 primary schools and 2 secondary schools participated in anti-littering educational activities, at least 38 local businesses have supported the campaign and over 11,470 local people have been actively engaged with elements of the campaign. Through our various interventions we have directly collected over 522 bags of litter.
We used questionnaires to collect qualitative feedback measuring the effectiveness of communicating the issue of littering in each of the campaign elements. The Forest of Dean District Council conducted regular litter-picks along roads in the Forest of Dean which showed litter levels dropped from 6 bags per km to 2.7 bags per km – however this does not measure litter within the forest. Where possible we conducted litter-picks around our interventions to evaluate their individual effectiveness. These litter picks suggested slight improvements in some locations and no improvements in others.
Over the three years the campaign has secured 18 broadcast features, 32 mentions in press media and 19 in trade press. We tracked the campaign reach through press, broadcast and social media, this secured a total reach of 15 million people. Coverage included BBC Inside Out, BBC World News, BBC Radio 5 Live, Heart FM, the BBC main news site, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Mirror and Huffington Post.
Love Your Forest was successful due to various elements. The following recommendations are relevant to anyone wishing to do an anti-littering campaign elsewhere:
• Do initial insights and find out what people want.
• Collaborate with as many people as possible.
• Use rewards to engage with people and start a conversation .
• Use prove behaviour change techniques and build interventions based on these.
• Make engagement relevant to the audience.
Love Your Forest worked closely with community groups to collaborate and build the campaign with individual audiences in mind. It’s a bespoke campaign that was built to tackle litter specific to the Forest of Dean. Communicating the issue of littering in this way meant we achieved significant community engagement, generated a desire for further campaigns to be developed and successfully raised awareness of the impact of littering in the forest. The most successful elements will go on to be funded by Lucozade Ribena Suntory for another year with support from Hubbub, Forest of Dean District Council, Forestry Commission, Foresters’ Forest and Wye Valley and Forest of Dean Tourism.
1 https://www.hubbub.org.uk/neat-streets 2 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/litter-and-littering-in-england-2016-to-2017/litter-and-littering-in-england-2016-to-2017