Anti-litter advertising: will it work?

Dublin City Council is to tackle litter this month with a new advertising campaign called "Nobody wants your litter. Bin it."

Apparently cigarette butts, chewing gum and fast food packaging together account for 75% of the city's litter, and this is what the ads will address. The Herald reports that Failte Ireland and the Department of the Environment are funding the campaign.

If the object of the exercise is to encourage litter bugs to change their behaviour, would the money not be better spent on stronger enforcement of the litter bye-laws? Probably.

Belfast City Council launched an anti-litter advertising campaign in 2004. Before the campaign began, 52% of people surveyed by the Council's Cleansing Department admitted to having littered in the past six months. Six years later, the figure is at 48%, according to a study published in May. Not a huge improvement, by any standards.

The head of Belfast City Council's Cleansing Department reported that littering in the city has actually gotten worse in the past year, with the number of people who admitted to having littered in the past six months back to 2005 levels.

The research, conducted in February and March of this year, showed that the public advertising campaign had created a "high awareness of litter in the public's mind." But that awareness, unfortunately, did not cause a change in behaviour in Belfast.

Also, Earth, Wind and Spire has noticed the new Dublin City Council campaign posters at busstops but this is not the most effective medium, if Belfast's experience is anything to go by. The overwhelming majority - 87% - of people in Belfast who said they were familiar with the anti-litter campaign recalled it from television.