PER picks for how you can celebrate Earth Day
1st: Check out Heal the Bay’s fun and interactive “Trash Your Friends” Campaign:
Here’s how it works:
1. You log into http://trashed.healthebay.org/
2. Click on “trash your friends”
3. Enter the website address you want to “trash”; it can be any web page.
4. Enter the e-mail address of the person you want to notify that you “trashed” that particular website.
5. Enter your e-mail address so the person knows it comes from you.
6. Click Next
7. You then choose the trash character you want to use (click on the character)
8. Personalize your note
9. Click Send
The campaign is to raise awareness in a fun, interactive way about the problem of disposable plastic bags polluting our ocean.
2nd: Check out this article on how veterans are pushing for a Climate Bill to fight global warming and defend our national security.
3rd: Learn about the experience of Latinos in California’s water crisis by checking out this previous post of mine here.
Happy Earth Day everyone!
Reusable Bags: The BETTER Choice
Here’s a rustic print ad I did with the help of my friend Saira who modeled for me-thank you Saira! (this was part of an assignment that I did for a Communications class I’m currently taking):
Paper AND plastic are BOTH bad choices for your health
These are the basic elements of the ad:
Attention grabber: bright colors in the fruit and vegetables
Appeal: fruit, healthy living, relatable to you (you could see yourself doing what Saira is doing).
Narrative: the ad asks the question that you often hear at the grocery store: “paper or plastic?” It then urges you to be different, to “step outside of the box” and to support and pick “the better choice”: reusable bags.
Call to action: it asks you to reject the use of paper AND plastic bags so you can instead use reusable bags; it also invites you to visit the site www.healthebay.org/store so you can get your own reusable bag. In the future, the site could change to something like healthebay.org/healthyfuture (Heal the Bay does not have a site that has such a name … yet) that could be a centralized online center for people to take action (like send letters of support to newspapers and legislators or the like) on various issues dealing with marine debris. Ideally, the center would reinforce the idea that it’s going to take all of us to solve the problem of plastic bags polluting our environment, working together: 1) through legislation that taxes the use of plastic and paper bags to discourage usage, 2) cleanup efforts, and 3) reclycling campaigns; and that if you take one element out (because of pressure from powerful moneyed interests), the efforts will most likely fail to solve much.
I’m also trying to frame the situation very clearly with this ad with some long-term messaging:
- Plastic AND paper bags = bad for your health (because it impacts your quality of life).
- Reusable bags = healthy living, promising future, protecting your children from pollution.
Sure, the ad is not commercial-quality, but I think it gets the point across very effectively nevertheless.
PS Don’t forget to click on the picture of the print ad above: it takes you to a video that CurrentTV aired about the problem of plastic bag pollution in our rivers and ocean.
Plastic PR Campaigns
Plastic bags float in green slime in Compton Creek. The trash that flows through inland waterways eventually ends up in the ocean and on the beach.
I’d like to share an experience that I had last year with a PR campaign that I thought was very clever but was nevertheless quite damaging to the environment.
As you may have heard on the news, there is currently a push to increase the use of reusable bags when one goes grocery shopping. This is so the use of single-use plastic carry out bags is diminished. The reasons why environmental groups want to discourage the use of single-use plastic carry out bags are many, but the bottom line is that these bags pollute the environment and kill marine animals. For a list of fact on this issue, visit this page:
http://www.healthebay.org/currentissues/ppi/theneed_bags.asp
You can also watch this CurrentTV video that summarizes the issue pretty well:
http://current.com/items/89141407/plastic_is_murder.htm
One way to discourage the use of single-use carry-out plastic bags would be to put a tax on them (and on paper bags as well-since their use are no better for the environment). For this reason, there have been several bills in the California legislature to make this tax on plastic bags a reality.
Now, you might think “well that sounds all good to me so who would opppose it?”
Enter the all-powerful plastic and chemistry industry. When the plastic industry got word of the legislative attempts to decrease the use of their precious plastic bags, they VERY quickly launched a massive radio, online, and billboard ad campaign to basically kill ALL legislative attempts at curbing the use of plastic bags. Not only did they oppose the legislation, they crafted a misinformation campaign that was so effective that it had legislators up in Sacramento shaking in their boots. The campaign revolved around this site:
They even funded a “Save The Plastic Bag Coalition” if you can believe it. Their angle was basically this: “politicians are insensitive rat bastards that want to tax you for using plastic bags that are already being recycled.” Now, when you put it that way, who wouldn’t agree with the plastic industry, right? Well, that’s exactly the point.
The level of deceipt in their pro-plastic bag ads was amazing. First off, it wasn’t “politicans” that were behind the legislation, it was actual environmental and community groups-real average people that were pushing for such legislation because they were concerned about the health of their environment and of their communities. Second, the idea that single-use plastic bags are actually being recycled is just plain false. There is a small percentage that is being recycled, but it is basically so tiny that it is NOT making a difference. That is why more aggressive steps-like the legislation that was being considered, are needed to address the problem. For an explanation of the pro-environmental stance on what happened, check out these two posts:
http://spoutingoff.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/evil-incarnate/
http://spoutingoff.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/compton-creek-bags-slime/
Ultimately, the solution to the platic bag problem rests in the view that “we’re all on this together”. It’ll take all of us to tackle this problem through educational efforts, volunteer activities like beach cleanups, recycling efforts like what some grocery stores are attempting to do, AND legislative efforts to discourage their use (like the tax on plastic and paper bags). If you take one those elements out, we will probably NOT solve the problem effectively any time soon.
After everything was said and done, I am wondering what kind of messaging techniques the environmental groups should have used in order to counter the misinformation campaign that the plastic industry launched against them. This was definitely a battle of the big wealthy plastic industry with big pockets against the small tiny nonprofit enfironmental/community groups. A tale of David & Goliath indeed; but in this case, Goliath (sadly) won.
