Annual review

Surrey Environment Partnership
April 2020 – March 2021

Activity and achievements 2020-21

Managing Surrey’s waste: Getting real about nappies

Research from the Environment Agency has shown that the weekly rubbish collected from parents with babies could be halved if they use cloth nappies. Additionally, contamination of recycling bins with disposable nappies is a significant and costly issue and one way to avoid this would be if more parents used cloth nappies instead of disposables.

To encourage Surrey residents to do this, a SEP trial kit scheme offered them the opportunity to try using real nappies before committing to buying them. The scheme was planned to continue in 2020-21, but had to be paused due to the coronavirus pandemic.

However, independent research just prior to the pandemic had revealed a significant number of people in Surrey had misconceptions about modern real nappies. So, it was agreed to focus on communications to try and change perceptions and encourage residents to consider real nappies if they were planning, expecting or had a new baby.

This was done through targeted digital advertising on social media and relevant websites, as well as through films featuring mums who use real nappies that aimed to bust myths and educate people. Despite the relatively small target audience, some good results were achieved.

Evaluation highlights

• During the campaign period, there were 8,600 pageviews of the SEP website campaign pages, with a longer than average time on page of 3 minutes 10 seconds.
• Campaign videos were seen almost 8,000 times.
• Facebook posts were seen more than 148,000 times and generated over 6,000 video views. There were also 6,200 engagements on the posts (likes, comments, shares, link clicks), which is a very high level of engagement.