Love Where You Play
Litter prevention at Community Football Days
In 2017, we teamed up with McDonalds to roll out #LoveWhereYourPlay. An awareness campaign touring the UK, tackling litter at 16 of McDonald’s and the FA’s annual summer series of Community Football Days by engaging with young players and their families on litter prevention, in a fun, playful way.
Messaging was built around the ‘Love Where You Live’ legacy, tailored to give football fans their best shot at giving litter the boot.
The problem
During the summer, Community Football Days invited families and children to join in the fun of grassroots football and attend sessions to try out the sport and experience professional coaching. Each year, these events brought together over 50,000 participants, bringing people together in communities across the UK.
These events created litter, but also presented a brilliant opportunity to communicate litter messaging in an engaging way to families and young players, ‘i.e., Be Messi, not Messy’, to nudge positive behaviours when on and off the pitch.
Our approach
Red card for littering? No thanks. Green card for binning your rubbish? Yes please.
Alongside some tense games of footie, the Love Where You Play campaign saw litter referees engaging with the public, conducting mini-litter picks and encouraging players and families to use ‘flat pakka’ bins (temporary pop-up litter bins) to dispose of their rubbish. The litter referees rewarded positive litter actions spotted with ‘green cards’. - (no VAR needed)
At the end of each Community Football Day, two personalised ‘goal bins’ were donated to the host football club gamifying disposal to make the act of binning feel more like winning. The bins, manufactured by Wybone, had two separate compartments for general waste and mixed recycling, with a divider in-between that keeps the waste segregated to avoid cross contamination.
The impact
We delivered Community Football Days at 16 different locations across the UK, from Leatherhead to Giffnock, and Abergavenny to Strathaven
Litter referees handed out 1600 Green Cards featuring campaign messaging to players and their families
We gifted 32 permanent Goal Bins to host clubs, extending the legacy of #LoveWhereYourPlay
Get involved
Want to give litter the boot at community events? Check out out litter picking guide.
In need of more binspiration? Check out our Ballot Bin here, proven to reduce cigarette litter by up to 73% (Ellipsis Earth, 2021)!
