Turkey is number 1 in Europe in plastic waste. There are 94.8% of plastic waste in the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and for every 4 square meters there is 1 plastic waste. European Union countries banned the consumption of single-use plastics with the decision they took in 2019. But the proposal is still in draft in the Turkish parliament and the consumption of single-use plastics has increased even more with the epidemic. Greenpeace Mediterranean has launched a signature campaign to convey to the Ministry of Environment, on “plastiktenkurtul.org" and they wanted to draw attention to this issue with a social media campaign.

Logos of popular locations tend to reflect their beauties... Sea, sun, landmarks, animals. The truth is all the places that inspire these designs are actually heavily littered by visitors. So, we changed the logos of municipalities of tourist locations which suffer most from plastic waste. We littered their logos with single-use plastic items. And reached out to people through their popular social media accounts.

Insight: Pollution and other environmental issues needed to be addressed by key opinion leaders and influencers because the public expects them to be involved and act. One of the influencers for the target audience is the social media accounts of municipalities and other local governing bodies that are active on social media and have very high engagement rates.

Key message: Pollution is everywhere, especially in areas that are considered to be natural preservation areas. These places include urban neighbourhoods, most popular vacation destinations and counties with higher demand for a sustainable life.

Target audience: General public, environment-savvy people and locals.

Creation and distribution of assests: Official logos were "polluted" with plastics and proactively distributed on social media with a call to action to targeted municipalities.

The flow started with the municipalities labelling each other and creating a flood on Twitter. Later, people started to support these municipalities that made their voices. The inclusion of non-contracted municipalities in the flood and logo change of their own accord, and people's labelling also increased the size of the business. We thought of our campaign as a single day: 21 July 2020. But people continued to call their own municipalities to the campaign. And then municipalities continued to participate in the campaign by changing their logos on their own initiative for a few more days.

34 other municipalities participated in our campaign, which we started with only a few volunteer municipalities. They also changed their logos and helped us to raise awareness against plastic waste. Our campaign was implemented with 0 media budget. We reached people by taking part in local and national news and earned a PR value of X million Turkish Lira with this budget. Also on the same day, we became a trending topic on Twitter with our hashtag #PlastiktenKurtul and reached 4.5M+ people in just two days. More than 500.000 people signed our petition, actually 525k+ based on the March 2021’s data. “Plastiktenkurtul.org” is still active.