Every Can Counts
Helping Boomtown Fair to capture those cans!
- #InTheLoop
- Slow Threads
- #ElectricAvenue
- ZAP
- Fit for reuse
- Recycle Week
- Boosting kerbside battery collections
- Every Can Counts
- E-waste amnesty
- Ribena consumer awareness video
- Metal recycling campaign
- School recycling workshops
Driving long-term behaviour change
Set-up just over a decade ago, and financially supported by Ecosurety for a few years now, Every Can Counts is the leading programme to promote metal drink can recycling.
Enjoying their busiest summer yet in 2019, Every Can Counts had a presence at over 30 UK festivals and sporting events, resulting in an impressive collective audience of over one million people to interact with. Our team just had to get involved to spread the word!
Find out more about Every Can Counts
Can recycling has never been so important
The issue of can recycling has never been so important. With so many festivals and consumers striving to be plastic free, drink cans are often now the single-use container of choice.
Importantly, the objective of Every Can Counts is to not only increase can recycling rates at the events themselves, but to help drive longer-term behaviour change when the festival goers have returned home.
Volunteering at Boomtown Fair
Members of the Ecosurety team happily volunteered for 96 collective hours as Every Can Counts recycling ambassadors at Boomtown Fair in August 2019, an event that welcomes an audience of 66,000 people.
Working throughout the day (and partying at night!), our team collected cans in specially designed backpacks and directly engaged with festival goers to spread the good word about recycling and complete consumer behaviour surveys.
The impact of a can-do attitude
Over 21,000 cans were collected as a direct result of the Every Can Counts team activities at Boomtown. This included giving away popular rewards in return for recycling cans, ranging from temporary tattoos to free money-can’t-buy t-shirts.
At five festivals alone in 2019 these rewards help generate over 51,000 extra collected cans.
To further encourage can recycling voting bins were also utilised and festival goers were encouraged to fill specially commissioned wire cage letters that spelt out ‘Boomtown’ with cans.
It wasn't all about getting those cans however - a total of 2,370 surveys were completed at the festival which revealed a number of key statistics, including:
- people were most impressed by the fact that aluminium can go through the recycling process an infinite number of times
- they perceived plastic and cartons to be the hardest to recycle materials
- recycling points are perceived to be most needed on the street
Learning and next steps
Our team discovered that engaging with so many people about recycling in such a short space of time was a really rewarding, positive and insightful experience, greatly helping them to understand the factors and incentives that effect behaviour change.
Would they do it again? Despite being physically exhausting work and enduring the worst that the British summer weather had to throw at them – yes they would!
