| Abstract |
The management of wastes is vital in terms of preserving a clean and healthy environment for citizens. Historically, the importance of the waste management sector to society's quality of life has not really been widely recognized and acknowledged. In fact, it has suffered from a poor image and has been characterized as: "dirty work in dirty and dangerous places carried out by people with little or no qualifications for little or no wages, sometimes just for subsistence on discarded materials." However, we have started to see an increase in public awareness and education relating to environmental issues, public consultation on matters such as the siting of waste facilities, and the development of thinking and actions relating to sustainable development. We all know that our modern society faces many pressing problems, of which the development of a sustainable approach to waste and resource management is just one. In developing countries there are >50,000 dumpsites, with >2 million people working on them, that either need to be closed or require significant improvement, while in developed countries there is a strong desire to use innovative ideas from research projects and industrial partnerships to transition to a circular economy. This is especially true for modern waste streams such as e-waste as it is one of the fastest growing and potentially one of the most environmentally damaging and resource intensive global waste streams, with e-waste collection and recycling being outstripped by e-product consumption. Recovering value from as much e-waste as possible is essential to protect human health and the environment and avoid critical resource and economic losses. Enabling effective resource management requires active public engagement and motivation - alongside appropriate infrastructure and service provision - and this is hugely challenging. Many political, environmental, social, technological, legal and economic approaches have been trialed, but only slow progress has been achieved. This is partially because scientists frequently experience considerable difficulties in communicating research findings to the public in an expedient way. Traditional methods of public communication about waste - consultation papers and requests for comments; community information (posters, leaflets, doorstepping, focus groups); meetings (private or public); citizens' juries & parliaments; workshops & seminars; advisory panels, committees and fora; stalls at fairs / events; mass media campaigns (radio / TV / the Internet) - tend to have limited, mainly short-term impacts. Even very high-profile campaigns in the UK - the use of popular children's TV characters The Wombles to highlight the problem of littering and the Waste and Resources Action Programme's highly acclaimed "Love Food Hate Waste" campaign did not stop litter and food waste, respectively, from continuing to rise. This is because these methods tended to assume that the divergence between scientific and public views on such topics are fundamentally caused by incomplete/flawed public knowledge, and so communication efforts focused on public education and awareness raising. In fact, recent studies have highlighted that ideology, not knowledge, best predicts environment-related attitudes and behaviour, leading researchers to move away from investigating cognitive bias towards investigating the effectiveness of emotion-based approaches. The problem is particularly notable in waste management due to the scale and immediacy of the issues at stake. Whilst the public may be aware of general waste management related issues, they may be unaware of new and emerging issues and the collective positive impacts they can cause by changing their behaviour. This is significant, since: i) citizen support is essential for implementation of new and/or ambitious waste-related policies and ii) populism and its rhetoric are currently burgeoning, often influencing the public away from policies based on science-based evidence, Hence, in order to communicate scientific findings in a way that is more accessible to the public, new methods must be explored. In his presentation, Professor Ian Williams will identify, explain and critically review previous methods of consulting/communicating with the public and key stakeholders and highlight why they have often failed to deliver anticipated success. He will explain why conveying the importance, gravity and potentially adverse impacts of waste-related problems to the public effectively is a huge challenge. He will then introduce a new and innovative communication method that uses intergenerational influence, combined with emotional responses to music and art, which has been shown to help to promote pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. The so-called "TRACE project" was successful in developing a new way to communicate to the public about e-waste through combining creative art and music, intergenerational influence and science. The approach will be illustrated by reference to recent cases studies involving e-waste. E-waste was selected for study because it is one of the fastest growing global waste streams. Consumption of e-products far exceeds e-waste recycling rates. As e-waste accumulates scientists struggle to communicate scientific findings and concepts effectively and expediently to the public in a way that raises awareness and inspires discussions. The TRACE (TRAnsitioning to a Circular Economy with creative artists) project was a collaboration between scientists, creative artists and primary schoolchildren to develop new ways to communicate to the public about e-waste. It combined i) intergenerational influence and ii) music / art to raise public awareness, educate and provoke discussion. Two musical performances by schoolchildren and two art exhibitions by a professional artist were created to evoke emotional responses to e-waste, particularly by imbuing e-waste with personality through anthropomorphism in their songs and artwork. Key findings indicate that awareness was raised in audiences, artists, schoolchildren, and their caregivers due to their involvement in the TRACE project; 99% of the audience reported a rise in awareness of e-waste issues; 70% of participants indicated an intention to change e-waste disposal; and 65% indicated an intention to change reuse and repair behaviour. Audiences demonstrated strong emotional reactions to the project alongside change in behavioural intent. The degree to which awareness was raised, and its intensity, demonstrates the viability of the use of intergenerational influence and the creative arts as tools to communicate environmental issues effectively. The project consequently won a prestigious 2021 UK National Recycling Award for (communication) Campaign of the Year (Large) and contributed inspiration towards the launch of a BBC TV series. The TRACE method could therefore be used to generate public support for pro-environmental policies based upon independently peer-reviewed, widely supported and trusted scientific evidence. This is a significant finding, since citizen support is essential for implementation of ambitious environmental policies. |
