3. Objective: Stop people flushing period products down the loo!
Introduce reusables as an option.
Audience: Young women (15-35 year olds)
Evaluation: Video views, media coverage.
PHASE 1
4. Objective: Normalise and educate about reusable products.
Audience: Women (10-40 year olds), school-aged students.
Evaluation: Social media and event reach, PR & media, number of partners,
reusable and plastic-free product sales
PHASE 2
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. • Disposable tampon, menstrual pad and panty liner sales
have dropped by £5.7m since 2016•
The Rise of the Reusable
• The number of Google searches for ‘menstrual cup’ has increased by
almost 300% in the last 5 years
• Sales of washable pads TRIPLED for 3 days following our BBC
Woman’s Hour interview
Hinweis der Redaktion
2 years ago I landed a job that had been on my bucket list since I was a kid - I was researching manta rays for the Manta Trust in the Maldives.
About 2 weeks into my job I was snorkeling and trying to keep up with a group of mantas when the top 30cm of water suddenly became thick with pollution. There were tea bags, orange peel, and then I swam face-first into a period pad.
A year and a half later I joined City to Sea in Bristol as their Campaigns Coordinator and now find myself working on our Plastic Free Periods campaign!
Our target audience was young women and the primary goal was to reduce plastic pollution by stopping people flushing their period products down the toilet!
Within X months the video had had 3 million views and we’d been featured in a Guardian article about eco-friendly period products. It definitely highlights the importance of having an attention grabbing video thumbnail when making a campaign video!
For phase 2 of our campaign we’ve been focusing on raising awareness of the benefits that reusable or plastic-free disposable period products have for our health, our finances and the environment. Believe it or not you can save up to 94% of what you would have spent on disposable products over your lifetime by switching to reusables!
As well as our digital campaigning we’re trying to obtain funding to roll out an unbiased period education project which we’ve trialled in 14 schools with 850 pupils.
We’ve used videos to help normalize the conversation and address lots of the questions that people have about plastic-free alternatives (although none have done quite so well as the first one with our founder pulling plastic out of her knickers!)
We launched one of these videos at the start of Environmenstrual Week which tied in to the activities of more than 30 other organisations in the Environmenstrual Coalition. We ran our own live event in Bristol and hosted an online panel Q&A with ‘period experts’.
It turns out that shame and stigma are the biggest reason for people flushing their period products and feeling uncomfortable about reusables. To try and help break down some taboos and make it easier to discuss periods we’ve experimented with using beautiful or eye-catching visuals and poetry. Annoyingly Always (who’s products are full of plastic and who’s marketing contributes to misleading ideas about periods) used a poem by Hollie McNish in a great advert at a similar time!
One of our biggest successes has been being featured on BBC Women’s Hour! In fact..
Sales of washable pads TRIPLED for 3 days following our BBC Woman’s Hour interview! It can be quite tricky to measure the direct success of an awareness raising campaign when you're part of a wider movement, so this was a really amazing achievement for us!
Plastic Free Periods IS part of a wider movement towards normalising reusable products and breaking period taboo, and here’s a couple of other facts that support the success of the movement and rise of reusable period products….Disposable tampon, menstrual pad and panty liner sales have dropped by £5.7m since 2016•
The number of Google searches for ‘menstrual cup’ has increased by almost 300% in the last 5 years
Moving forward we plan to more strongly target government, retailers and manufacturers as well as working towards rolling out our schools program. Thanks everyone, and if anyone would like to share ideas about how to reach a wider audience or would be interested in collaborating please find me later on or tomorrow!