More, and better?

In my idle trawl of funding news today I noticed this:

Website Will Show A Better Way To Recycle

A new website that will make it easier for people to recycle has scooped the top prize in a Government-sponsored competition. The Can I Recycle It portal was judged the overall winner of the Show Us A Better Way contest, which asked members of the public to devise a website that would provide a useful service using some of the non-personal data held by the Government.

This competition was one I noted, but then promptly forget, partly because I'm old, partly because I don't trust the government to credit inventors properly, and hence suspected that any ideas would soon become a very public/bureaucrat domain and not much to do with the creator, and partly because in my experience such things are often judged on agenda rather merit.

Interesting that many have noted another gov/quango site, Recycle Now, seems to have roughly the same thing. Also mentioned is Sort it. Can't have enough of a good thing, I guess. Slight duplication of effort on the public purse, mind.

Fortunately, perhaps due to lack of targets and boxes to tick, reuse again gets missed.

Now, if they had a site for that! Ahead of our time still?

2nd Use in Action!

Just had in the latest consumer-inspiring creative from those jolly recycling chaps.

Fortunately, it has arrived just as I am preparing my speech for the forthcoming ECOPACK conference on the topic of, well, amongst other things: 'Giving your plastic bottles the chance of becoming something else.

Only... perhaps with a bit more Junkk.com end-benefit and a little RE:tie twist to top it off.

Nice to see the big bucks comm budgets cranking out those award-winners.

Does it all add up?

Just had a press release from WRAP's Recycle Now: Media success for Recycle Now Week

The final numbers are in and our major publicity campaign for Recycle Now Week delivered widespread national and local media coverage and 57,000 hits to the Recycle Now website.

An astonishing 170 regional events took place and analysis of the media coverage shows that over 60 million opportunities were generated for people to see the campaign and its ‘Transform Something Today’ message.

TV presenter Denise Van Outen was the public face of Recycle Now Week and appeared in national media including The Daily Star, Hello magazine and Closer. Denise also featured in The Daily Telegraph and BBC online in a dress made from recycled materials, which was specially designed for the campaign.

Interviews with Denise were aired on GMTV and 50 local radio stations. A centre page spread in the Guardian and a mini-newspaper dedicated to recycling in the Daily Mirror also helped to make Recycle Now Week a success.

Local council recycling teams, community groups and businesses rose to the challenge organising activities across the country and generating publicity on a local level.

All things considered in terms of staff and money expended, if anyone in the world of online is out there, what does 57,000 hits to a website mean by way of an achievement? Especially when how much was blown on ads and PR to point at the site?

I just ask, because I'm (that's all one of me - no quango board slary or bonus either) trying to drive Junkk.com to a monthly target of 500,000 unique visitors (having been told hits mean diddly) before I can claim to have a significant public medium to attract advertisers.

STABO £

Still smarting from being banned by the Beeb, I have decided to pick on someone my own si... er... someone else: Recycle Now Urges Holiday Makers to Get on-Board and Recycle their Brochures

Recycle Now the national recycling campaign for England, is issuing a reminder urging all holidaymakers to recycle their used holiday brochures instead of binning them and sending them to landfill.

Now, while it is a perfectly fine and logical message, if (as is claimed by the same mob) we are a nation of recyclers now, why on earth would I not pop my holiday brochure in my paper kerbside RE:box along with all the rest? Do I really need to be told this?

This just smacks of Statin' The Absolute Bleedin' Obvious and blowing a wadge of wonga in the process that could be better applied elsewhere.

I wonder if they'll fly into collect the award?

Thanks to my latest issue of recycle now's newsletter (snappily entitled RCN Newsletter, showing they really know who to avoid the spam filter and delete key), I now know who are the country's green, er, 'heroes':

Revealed: the nation’s green heroes

A new survey for Recycle Now has revealed the nation’s favourite environmental heroes. We asked over 1400 UK adults which celebrities they felt were the greenest.

Here are the results:

1. Prince Charles
2. Bob Geldof
3. Sting
4. Chris Martin
5. David Cameron
6. Bono
7. Richard Branson
8. Madonna
9. Cameron Diaz
10. George Clooney

Who would you have picked?

I was sooo tempted to reply. But, like this fine example of journalism, will remain mute. Speechless even.