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. 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.

The current mindset in Turkey towards SUP is that it is perceived as a necessary resource. In terms of awareness and action against SUPs, Turkey has lagged behind Europe. The EU directive which banned SUPs in Europe in 2018 has not yet been adopted in Turkey. Public authorities, including local municipalities are limited in the ability to collect, analyse and publish their recycling performance which limits the effectiveness of this regulation. Additionally, neither business owners nor local municipalities are investing in waste management systems which has resulted in poor collection and separation practices. The Turkish recycling sector has in fact focused on plastic waste imports because it is better collected and sorted making it cost effective and more profitable than managing waste generated in Turkey. The risk of mismanaged waste is that it ends up in the environment where it causes harm to wildlife and public health.

In Turkey, municipalities of popular locations are very active in social media. They have sizeable followings and also followed closely by both local and mainstream media. If we could share our message through them, 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 created a Twitter flood. 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 municipalities continued to participate in the campaign by changing their logos on their own initiative for a few more days.

Data gathering: Although the sustainability issues have a rising popularity in Turkey, the awareness about the danger of single use plastics did not seem to be powerful enough to create a national movement. However, Turkey is number #1 in Europe considering plastic waste. The single use plastics are popular especially in touristic sites thus seaside municipalities seem to easier to mobilize against the plastic waste simply because they are affected more.

Target audience: General Public, 18-60, environment-conscious and interactive social media users, sustainability advocates, nature-lovers, content-savy

Approach: First, we must draw the attention of target audience and then we can urge them to share the content and ask for regulations. To achieve that, we instrumentalize the logos of seaside as a creative space and by “polluting” the lovely logos we aimed to create a wave affect in social media.

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. 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.