On social media, people follow famous people. In Turkey people follow municipalities. Accounts of touristic places have following like they were K-pop bands. The same places are also the most effected by plastic waste. So, we polluted their logos in every plasticky way we could and then updated Twitter profiles with downgraded logos. People started saying: “Why is my municipality not part of this?”. So, 34 other municipalities participated in our campaign. We were the most talked about topic on social media that day with our hashtag: #PlastiktenKurtul. And yet, we reached 525k+ signature our petition.

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.

In Turkey, municipalities of popular locations are very active in social media. They have sizeable followings and consistently produce content. They are also followed closely by both local and mainstream media. If we could share our message through them in an inventive way, we knew it would create some buzz amongst people and the media would pick up on it. 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.

It’s hard to put in action people, especially for petition campaigns. For this reason, we targeted the environmentally conscious mass. We created the age range of this audience, who also actively uses social media, as 18-60 A, B group. To reach them, we went to municipalities suffering from plastic waste. You ask why? Because politics in Turkey, the daily life settled in almost all cases. People follow and interact with municipalities on social media. This formed our demographic strategy but there is one more thing...

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, to reflect the truth, logos, too, should be littered. This was the first time a message on pollution was communicated through such method and means.

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.