(Cigarette Butts) that make you want to pick up

Background

The Reflection Project is a non-profit organisation in Japan which is dedicated to raising awareness for environmental protection. One of their activities includes recruiting volunteers for their regular city clean-up / trash pickup sessions.

Idea

The insight was that people do not pick up the tiny pieces of trash they see everyday on the streets because they are too small for others to thank them for their civic concern. So an idea was required which would make people feel good about themselves to such an extent they would join in with the main clean-up event that was being planned.

Nothing epitomises casual trash better than the cigarette butt. The idea, then, was to leave 100 cigarette butts lying around central Tokyo. But these were giant butts and when a passer-by picked one up, he or she found within it a garbage bag printed with a Thank You message and an invitation to be a participant in the next clean-up.

In other words, trash was used to recruit people to deal with trash. 

Results

A 300% increase in the number of volunteers. And the organisation was able to complete its clean-up of Tokyo. 

Our Thoughts

There are two issues of scalability here. The first is that most people think their contribution, whatever it might be, will have no effect at all on tackling what appear to be insuperable problems. Even though the truth is indisputable, that when people act in concert, there is nothing they cannot achieve. The second is that when the nature of the problem is apparently insignificant, there’s nothing like blowing it up in size to make a point, which is precisely what Grey Tokyo have done here. A cigarette butt seems nothing, but exaggerated to a thousand times the size and the full scale of the problem becomes clear. I like the psychology of this approach.