Recycle Now · RY · 2019-2022
The New Normal
Recycling rates across the UK had plateaued. Not because people didn't care — but because the campaigns trying to move them were solving the wrong problem. Over three years, we helped Recycle Now rethink their approach from the ground up, turning recycling from a conscious choice into an unconscious habit.
Strategy · Behaviour Change · Campaigns · Sustainability
2019-2022
BEHAVIOURAL STRATEGY
CAMPAIGN PLANNING
ANNUAL RECYCLE WEEK ACTIVATIONS
MULTI-CHANNEL CAMPAIGN EXECUTION
PRINT · SOCIAL · DIGITAL · OOH · TV
COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING
THE STORY
The New Normal
THE SITUATION
The conventional approach to behaviour change campaigns starts from the same assumption: people need to be convinced. Show them the problem, explain why they should act differently, and hope the logic lands. For Recycle Now, that approach had run its course. The messaging was being tuned out — not because people disagreed with it, but because being told to do the right thing rarely changes what people actually do.
THE INSIGHT
There's a persistent misconception at the heart of most behaviour change work: that people resist doing good things. They don't. People generally want to do the right thing — they just tend to do the easiest thing, or the thing everyone around them is already doing. The insight that reshaped the entire strategy was this: it's far easier to make a behaviour feel normal than it is to persuade someone to change. Stop asking people to make a conscious choice. Make the choice invisible.
THE APPROACH
The strategic reframe was to shift recycling from a desired behaviour — something people should do — to a New Normal: something people simply do, almost without thinking, the way you ride a bike or lock the front door. Once it becomes procedural, it becomes effortless. Once it becomes effortless, it spreads.
That meant rethinking not just the messaging but the entire communications strategy — reducing friction, reinforcing the sense that this was just what everyone did, and using Recycle Week each year as a high-investment moment to shift the national conversation rather than just remind people recycling existed.
The work ran over three years across every major channel. The shift in recycling rates over that period — from 44.7% of UK households in 2018 to 88% by 2022 — reflects the cumulative effect of a strategy that treated recycling as a cultural norm to be embedded, not a habit to be nagged into existence.
THE WORK COVERED