New Fost Plus campaign makes you want to sort

February 15, 2022 - From mid-February, Fost Plus is launching a new national communication campaign on radio, television and social media. The campaign stresses the concrete results of packaging recycling and shows that consumers’ sorting efforts do make a difference.

Do you sometimes think the packaging you sort all ends up on the same waste mountain anyway? Do you lack information about what happens to your packaging after it’s been sorted? Then you are not alone, research shows. Because although we in Belgium sort particularly well compared with other European countries, there is still a great need for information about how and above all why.

You really do make a difference

With its new campaign, Fost Plus aims to change this. In a series of TV and radio spots, we show how, thanks to recycling, packaging is turned back into new packaging. A vinegar bottle becomes a bottle of champagne, ketchup packaging is transformed into a detergent container and the plastic bottle that held your soft drink promptly contains fruit juice.

Wim Geens, Managing Director of Fost Plus: “By stressing the concrete results, we make it clear that consumers’ daily efforts are worthwhile. By sorting their waste, they are helping to build a circular economy where increasingly scarce raw materials are no longer discarded after use, but stay in the cycle for as long as possible.”

And there is a direct link with global warming, because recycling raw materials releases less CO₂ than extracting new materials. The expansion of the sorting message to include all plastic packaging is expected to save about 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year.

Recycling all packaging. Let’s go for it.

Fost Plus’s ultimate aim is to recycle all packaging that comes onto the market. The new campaign slogan – Recycling all packaging. Let’s go for it. – highlights this ambition still further. With the New Blue Bag and the extension of the PMD sorting rules, in the past few years we have already taken a huge step in this direction. Every year, we collect 8 kg of extra packaging material for recycling per person, on top of the 15 kg that was already put in the blue bag previously. That means a lot less residual waste.

But we realise that there is still room for improvement. So we work closely with producers to increase the sustainability of their packaging. Ultimately, obstructive and non-recyclable packaging, such as some multilayer packaging that cannot be separated, has to go. Meanwhile, investments are being made in new sorting and recycling technologies to recover as much packaging as possible.

The new campaign will start in mid-February with a series of TV spots, followed in early April by radio spots, permanently backed up by messages on social media. And the campaign is not limited to a couple of peak moments, but will continue throughout the year for maximum activation. Because building a circular economy is a long-term task. More clarification about how recycling works can also be found on the following specific page: https://www.fostplus.be/en/letsgoforit.