“He’s a fat little squirrel,” Kathy commented as she hit the brakes to let the fluffy-tailed jaywalker cross.
We often see squirrels around town when I ride shotgun on Wednesday mornings during curbside recycling pickup with Keep Alliance Beautiful Executive Director Kathy Worley. They are more scarce when I go out on my own for a load of cardboard. Maybe it is because these nimble tree dwellers are one of Kathy’s favorite animals. I am more partial to seeing if I can find anything more exotic than a sparrow while looking for birds in the bushes and trees along the route.
Squirrels, of course, entered the conversation during the recent Keep America Beautiful National Conference in Washington, D.C. The morning had been loaded with information on topics ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency’s recycling strategy debut to the number of pieces of litter on the ground in America on any given day. Tim Shephard, senior creative director of marketing, took a brief detour to tell the affiliates in attendance about the organization’s current public service announcement: Recycle your bottles like everyone’s watching. The 30-second spot features squirrels Stacy and Tracy.
The scene opens with the squirrels perched on a tree branch overlooking a park. “Oh, Tracy look, she’s going for the bin,” Stacy tells her friend and they watch a runner dropping a water bottle in the blue container without stopping. They shout their thanks before noticing a man with a water bottle of his own approaching a trash can. “He’s putting it in the trash, I can’t look,” Tracy says. Instead they see him put the bottle in his bag “to recycle later.” The woodland creatures again congratulate the human though all he hears when looking up is chattering. Stacy and Tracy agree they could and do watch humans all day long as the PSA ends with the title appearing in white lettering over the scene.
This campaign also includes three shorter videos of the squirrels reacting to other park visitors recycling. Shephard said the campaign had been released a couple months before and had already garnered more than 100 million impressions with television exposure in the top 100 markets in the country. Keep America Beautiful hopes to expand the PSA to a larger recycling education campaign. “(We) hope it has legs for a couple years,” he said.
Check our local broadcast TV stations for the PSAs or visit https://kab.org and scroll down to find it.
I think the “Stacy and Tracy” spots are effective because the message comes from the perspective of residents who value a clean neighborhood (and recycling in particular) – squirrels and a city park in this case. The main characters represent actual animals without being too realistic or combining animation with an actual setting and real people. And, well, they’re cute.
If these animals register with the American public I expect to see more people recycling PET (polyethylene terephthalate), also known as No. 1 plastic found in water, pop and other drink bottles as well as other common packaging and containers. According to kab.org, PET is the most recyclable plastic in the U.S. at close to 30 percent.
Really, though, how much difference can a pair of spokes-animals make? I can think of two that influenced my view of the environment growing up – Woodsy Owl, “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute,” and Smokey Bear, “Remember . . . Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires”. Maybe in 30 years my children and their generation will owe some of their sense of stewardship to a couple of silly squirrels.