Nearly 50 million tons of e-waste is generated every year worldwide, and gamers are some of the biggest culprits, with most unaware of how to properly dispose of their old electronics.

As a tech leader, it is Intel’s responsibility to offer creative solutions for this growing problem. We needed to find a way to cut through a crowded media landscape and reach gamers in an authentic way that would make them listen and willingly learn about properly eCycling e-waste.

Intel, a leader in gaming tech, wanted to show gamers the true potential of their e-waste. So we hopped into a game with its own surprisingly bad in-game e -waste problem, Animal Crossing, and spent over 1,000 hours as a player creating from scratch the game’s first ever e-waste eCycling center: eCycleLand. Here, players brought in their in-game e-waste (known as “rusted parts”) to eCycle them into new, prized pieces of in-game technology (think laptops and gaming rigs), all while learning to do the same with their real-life e-waste as well.

The gaming industry's immense popularity has resulted in a concerning increase in e-waste, with over 3 billion active gamers worldwide contributing to this growing challenge. To combat this issue, we recognized the importance of engaging this audience directly.

To educate gamers on the impact of e-waste, we decided to meet them where they were — in-game. Our research revealed that Animal Crossing, one of the best-selling games of all time, mirrored the real world's e-waste problem, with discarded in-game “rusted parts” being accepted as normal and “worthless.” So, as a player we created an island within the game where gamers could eCycle their virtual e-waste while also learning how to eCycle in the real world.

IMPLEMENTATION:

We jumped into Animal Crossing as a player and spent over 1,000 hours building — from scratch — eCycleLand. There is no cheat code to making an amazing island on the platform, so every single component needed to be crafted, sourced and designed by hand.

TIMELINE:

Launched on National Recycling Day, Nov. 15, and ran for 10 days.

PLACEMENT:

This activation was accessible via Animal Crossing and streamed on Twitch and YouTube.

SCALE:

eCycleLand became one of the largest and most impressive builds the Animal Crossing community has ever seen, reaching players from all corners of the globe. To create something of this magnitude, the creative team painstakingly sourced tens of thousands of individual items and hand drew over 65 original patterns pixel by pixel. In total, eCycleLand ended up costing over $400 million worth of in-game currency.

All this hard work paid off. In just two weeks, with zero paid media spend, eCycleLand had garnered over 4.6 million impressions and 261,200 interactions across various platforms. As word spread across the gamer community about our island, players lined up, waiting 22 minutes just to get in (eCycleLand is a one-at-a-time experience). Once on the island, they spent over 14 minutes eCycling their in-game e-waste and learning about how to e-cycle in real life too!

Online our message resonated too, with a 99% positive sentiment score on earned social, Twitch, YouTube and 72,300 livestream views. More importantly, we got people talking about a topic that previously wasn't on their radar — with 19% of online conversation about eCycleLand focusing specifically on the topic of e-waste.

But we didn't just get people talking — we also inspired action as we boosted intent to eCycle 46%.