Winning the War on Waste

Karen Cannard, this year’s Gold Winner in the media category of the Green Apple Awards, knows that the battle against waste is never over. Her Rubbish Diet, originally a blog, and now a fun and easy ‘slimming club for bins’, continues to convert new devotees but she is always on the look-out for more.

“Winning this award is a fantastic accolade.” Karen commented, “but there’s still so much more to be done. For example, in West London alone, over 2/3rds of the rubbish that goes to landfill could have been recycled.”

Mark Murphy, BBC Radio Suffolk’s mid morning presenter and co-winner of the Green Apple Award explains “The Rubbish Diet’s a simple, fun thing that every household or business could do and I am thrilled that it’s got the national recognition it deserves.” 

Karen and Mark won the award for their radio Rubbish Diet Campaign on BBC Radio Suffolk. The Rubbish Diet is a diet for your bin that just like any other kind of diet consists of small steps that combine to create a powerfully easy way to slim household waste and recycle, reduce and reuse more. 

For the radio campaign, Mark and Karen created an 8 week-long feature, with different themes each week, starting with Mark’s trip to landfill, an experience that still haunts him now. “Seeing first-hand the scale of a landfill site, and some of the things that are being buried forever was shocking,” he says, “I was able to convey a lot of that to our listeners, many of whom then went on to do the Rubbish Diet with me.” Mark himself slimmed his bin by an impressive 60%, and callers in to the show were regularly reporting similar or greater reductions.

The mixture of themed pre-records, call-ins and engagement with journalists at Bury Free Press and East Anglian Daily Press resulted in a community noise that was hard to miss. A winning combination, not just for the Green Awards, but for Suffolk as a whole.

The Rubbish Diet is, as Steve Palfrey, Head of Waste for Suffolk County Council said after the campaign aired, a “pragmatic, adaptable approach that is very different from beating people over the head with ‘ten things they must do’”. Karen’s unique style; ‘non-preachy’ and chatty, is what enables The Rubbish Diet to be so subtly effective and to reach audiences otherwise turned off by environmental messaging. The Diet regularly motivates people whose bins are bulging (over 75% full) and converts them into fully-fledged recycling ambassadors, with some reducing their waste by as much as 95%.

“Bringing The Rubbish Diet to life on radio was, in retrospect, a natural progression,” says Karen, “The Rubbish Diet is all about empowering communities and creating networks of waste reduction champions. And local radio is the natural voice and home of the community – so it worked together really well. ”