Does everything need to be driven by promotional activity?

Birmingham City Council have partnered with Nectar to award points to any household with a Nectar card who put out rubbish for recycling. Each time the bin is emptied the collector scans a bar code which allocates 25 Nectar points to the registered cardholder.

It seems that in a world driven by promotional activity an incentive is required to recycle. Maybe this is true as recycling rates start to plateau after several months of increasing penetration levels - but what value does this place on the act of recycling itself? Turning to schemes that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, like Nectar, diminishes the impact of any individual redemption and this scheme strikes us as a case in point.

Tags:  NectarBirminghamIncentivesrecycling

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Responsible. Smart. And Cool. These are the three words 13-29 year-olds (the generation known as Millennials) most associate with the Green movement according to a recent survey by New York youth media and youth trends company Generate.

Yet while younger consumers (and particularly the generation currently at school) are better informed and more strident about green issues than any other age group, their knowledge and attitudes often have little bearing on their actions.

The most startling statistic from the Generate report is that given a choice between a brand that has green credentials and a similar one at a lower price, 71 per cent of 13-17 year-olds say they’d go for the cheaper option. The balance swings in entirely the opposite direction for 22-29 year-olds with 63 per cent saying they’d be willing to fork out for a more expensive brand if it supports an environmental cause.

Tags:  ConsumersGreenwashGreenPackagingRecyclingBrandsSustainableResponsible

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