Vanessa Gibbin, Marketing and Behaviour Change Lead at Material Focus, explains how to reduce e-waste through inspiring behaviour change to increase electrical recycling rates.
Electricals are the UK’s largest growing waste stream, with 103,000 tonnes binned every year, and another 880 million unwanted electrical items gathering dust in people’s homes.
Yet these electricals are not actually waste. That broken TV in your attic? Those old headphones you’re about to bin? That flimsy charger that stopped working within a week? None of it is waste…
Literally, anything with a plug, battery, or cable can be recycled. At least 75% of all the materials inside electricals can be reused and turned into anything from solar panels to life-saving equipment.
The supply of metals like gold, copper and lithium are all essential to technology. Given they have such major environmental and social impacts when mined, it’s vital that we ramp up our recycling efforts.
Recently, the rise of “FastTech” – small, cheap, “throw-away” electricals, 90% of which are quickly binned – has only made things worse.
Five million “disposable” vapes are purchased, vaped and binned a week, and they’re causing hundreds of fires annually as their batteries are crushed in bin lorries.
How to reduce e-waste: The challenge
We know the desire to recycle is there, more than 80% of the population recycles paper and plastic, according to our annual Bellwether survey.
Material Focus’s annual Bellwether survey aims to measure the UK public’s changing attitudes and behaviours around recycling electricals.
However, despite 76% of us thinking recycling electricals is the right thing to do, only 43% say they think it’s easy.
Less than half of those surveyed realised that all electricals (not just devices with cables, but accessories like cables and ear pods, battery-operated toys and FastTech items such as vapes and hand-held fans) could be recycled.
Many others were unsure about how or where to do it; they didn’t see others recycling electricals and no one was talking about it.
Key barriers to reusing and recycling electricals were inertia, the time and effort required to understand how to sort them, a lack of confidence about what to do (where? how?), and, importantly, a lack of awareness that they can be donated, repaired or recycled.
Getting rid of smart tech was found to be even more challenging, with uncertainty around backing up and deleting data.
Our approach
We identified two key behaviours that needed to stop: the binning and the hoarding of unwanted electricals.
As well as two key behaviours people need to adopt: bagging up unwanted electricals and taking them to a reuse or recycling point.
Long-term behaviour change isn’t about coercion, it’s about removing friction and barriers to action by making it physically and mentally easier for people to act in the desired way.
Motivation can fluctuate, but if a behaviour is normalised and made easy, we’re more likely to stick with it.
Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that one of the keys to recycling rather than binning electricals is a simple bag! Having a nominated recycling bag for electricals at home makes recycling our old cables, toasters or kids’ toys as easy as throwing them in the bin.
From there, it’s a simple matter of finding out where to recycle them (via our Recycling Locator) and dropping the bag off as part of your daily routine.
Thanks to over 40 projects funded by our Electricals Recycling Fund, 10m+ more people now find doing the right thing easier.
Our campaign
In a sector dominated by talk of catastrophic environmental issues, we took a positive, solution-focused, test-and-learn approach to encouraging everyone to recycle their electricals.
After a rigorous research phase, we launched the “Recycle Your Electricals” campaign targeting the 88% of people already recycling paper and plastic but not necessarily electricals.
We focused on a simple message: “Never bin your electricals. Everything with a plug, battery or cable can be recycled, and turned into anything from children’s playgrounds to life-saving equipment”.
This was backed up by a website featuring a searchable Recycling Locator that makes it easy to find your nearest location to fix, donate or recycle electricals. (Launched with 3,000 drop-off points, there are now over 25,000 on the locator.)
To maximise our budget, exposure, likes and shares, we embedded our message at the most relevant moments, such as when people were decluttering, moving home or buying electricals.
As the campaign evolved, we focused our PR and advertising activity around two decluttering peaks: the National Spring Clean and the return to school in September (when parents traditionally clear the decks).
We also supported the WEEE Forum’s International E-waste Day in October as a moment in time to focus the public’s attention on our message.
One of our most powerful tools has been the creation of our brand messenger, HypnoCat, the funky feline star of our ad campaigns. The goal of this fluffy pink, techno-loving Pied Piper of electrical recycling was to hypnotise the nation into bagging up and recycling their electricals.
His hypnotic voice allows him to deliver simple, consistent messages about a dry and confusing topic in a fun, memorable way that cuts through the noise and clutter in a way that people remember long after they’ve seen the ads.
HypnoCat appears on hundreds of partner and paid channels like TV, radio, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, and in display ads, podcasts, newsletters, the sides of recycling lorries, posters, bin hangers and leaflets.
We personalised communications across different regions of the UK, and for different groups; “Humans of Leeds”, HypnoCat purrs, “Humans of Facebook”, “Students of the UK”.
We focused social media activity on the most commonly bought, binned and hoarded electricals, maximising recognition and driving action.
HypnoCat proved popular with people of all ages, gaining more than 1.3 million views on TikTok in one week, inspiring DJ remixes and pleas to have the song on Spotify, and being widely shared by our partners.
The campaign’s influence was seen across all age groups (with “pester power” undoubtedly driving some parents to action), life stages and attitudes, and has been shared widely by local council and brand partners.
We continue to identify and highlight trends within e-waste, like FastTech to keep the issue salient, to show people what they should be doing with their unwanted electricals, and to redefine what is “normal” behaviour.
Last year, we commissioned research that showed 16 small, cheap electrical products are being bought every second, more than half a billion per year.
Coloured X-ray images revealed the precious materials hidden inside FastTech. The media and the public were fascinated and we earned hundreds of pieces of coverage on the topic – including BBC Breakfast, BBC News and BBC and commercial radio channels – with a reach of over 819m.
Choosing the most powerful messengers is key. When it came to battery fires, we worked in partnership with the National Fire Chiefs Council, because, who is more relevant than a fire chief when talking about how to avoid fires?
We showed how “hidden” batteries inside electricals without cables are causing thousands of bin lorry and recycling fires, and educated the public on what to do with those electrical items.
Having launched in 2020 during COVID, the Recycle Your Electricals campaign now has 54% recognition amongst the UK public.
Millions of people have reconsidered what they do with their electricals and recent national data shows that recycling of small electricals increased by 6% YOY, the highest amount recycled in the last four years, which saved seven million kg of precious materials from being lost forever.
If you’re interested in working with us on International E-Waste Day this year on 14 October, get in touch and join the 2024 Great Cable Challenge.
