Anyone walking the streets of London recently will probably be familiar with the heavily promoted Recycle for London campaign. Instituted by outgoing mayor Ken Livingstone – who has never been less than vocal about his passion for green issues – the campaign aims to make it easier for Londoners to recycle more.
However, JK has first-hand experience of the real world challenges of this campaign. After recently moving offices, we discovered that – despite our best efforts to turn the agency a nice shade of green – our recycled waste wasn’t in fact being recycled at all. The reason being that our office landlords don’t pay for recycling collection services.
The thing is though that recycling and waste collection services are, according to the council, funded by the local council tax. Why then, when a company is required to pay a business rate – the equivalent to council tax – to cover ‘local services’ do they then have to pay an extra fee on top of these rates for services such as recycling collection?
Of course, the same doesn’t apply for residents – and rightfully so. If you want to make Londoners recycle more, you need to make it not only easier for them, but beneficial from a cost perspective as well. Yet businesses that produce way more waste than the average household seem to be being penalised by this new initiative.
It seems to me that, while the Recycle for London campaign has great intentions, it hasn’t been entirely thought through. You can’t create and promote a high-profile campaign designed to encourage people to recycle more and then put obstacles in their way to doing this.
As we PR practitioners know, a campaign needs to ensure that all details and elements of the programme are clearly defined and understood in advance if it is to succeed – but at the implementation level, this campaign is clearly sending mixed messages. As such, with businesses compelled to just chuck everything in the bin, I wonder what difference this is really going to make to getting Londoners to recycle more.
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