BITE Insight

More plastic was produced globally between 2002 and 2012 than in all of time before that. As a result, by 2050, if the rate of production does not lessen, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea.

These shocking statistics are designed to slot neatly into a tweet, allowing social media environmentalists to easily share a soundbite. But simply tweeting about the facts is not going to change the reality.

M&C Saatchi PR worked in collaboration with the grassroots movement Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) to create Wasteland, a campaign encouraging people to Join the Resistance and boycott single-use plastics.

The apocalyptic integrated campaign runs across print, digital and social. It is designed to shock. The video, voiced by the actor Imelda Staunton, refers to Wasteland as a new superpower, whilst the print images feature a plastic gas mask, nuclear bomb and submarine, giving the campaign an end-of-the-world feel.

Visitors to the Surfers Against Sewage website can download an Individual Action Plan to reduce their own use of plastic. They can also pledge to become Community Leaders to start to establish plastic-free communities and Plastic Free Coastlines. By 2020, SAS hopes to have created at least 125 of these communities across the UK.

Wasteland is a controversial, but powerful, metaphor for the area in the Pacific known as the North Pacific Gyre, where there is currently more plastic than plankton (approximately 269,000 tonnes). M&C Saatchi PR and SAS conceptualised Wasteland as a new country to dramatise the scale of the problem, using the film as a catalyst to generate a real, and very necessary, behavioural change.