Philip Morris Kazakhstan - #StopMusor

Philip Morris Kazakhstan – #StopMusor

The StopMusor campaign is designed to raise awareness among society about the hazardous consequences of small trash littering in public places and educate people about responsible waste disposal.

The purpose and objectives of the project:

It takes two weeks to develop a new habit, and yet it takes years to break the existing habits. Although, in just 3 years, PMK’s anti-littering project StopMusor has been able to reach three million people to foster behavioral change and improve habits towards environmental protection, using one simple message: stop littering. Littering spoils the environment and pollutes the land, water and eventually affects the whole ecosystem resulting in severe sustainability issues not only in Kazakhstan, but globally.

How it started

Being a tobacco company and acknowledging that the cigarette butts are among the most frequently found litter items, we seek to help change behavior to prevent littering and to encourage proper waste disposal. To do this, in 2020 we have launched pilot anti-littering awareness campaign “StopMusor” in Kazakhstan’s two largest cities Almaty and Astana. Currently the project covers all regions of Kazakhstan.

The StopMusor campaign is designed to raise awareness among society about the hazardous consequences of small trash littering in public places and educate people about responsible waste disposal.

Stakeholders Consumer waste is one of the greatest issues of the new era. Such complex problem can only be solved within the engagement of the whole society: businesses, NGOs, government, and activists. This is why we established strategic partnership with the Association of Ecological Organizations of Kazakhstan, the largest association of the environmental community, which mission perfectly reflects with the objective of the campaign: ecological education of society for driving positive behavioral change and achieving harmony between human activities and environmental protection.

Implementation of the project:

Social network sites

The main target audience of the campaign are citizens of the large cities in the range of 18-35 y.o. Consequently, we created a content-plan that included challenges with the special awards/recognitions, a series of online discussions with the ecologists and activists for awareness raising, social experiments with the waste collection. StopMusor’s social network sites covered more than 510,000 people.

Website and mobile application (stopmusor.kz; mobile app – StopMusor)

In the realms of the project we wanted to offer not only information, but provide our citizens an instrument, which allows to contribute to the littering issue in practice. To do so we used an innovative approach by embedding a function of eco-map, that allows people to tag a location of the spontaneous dump or any other eco-problem in their city. Thanks to the eco-map, collected requests are gathered and sent to city authorities to further assess and resolve the ecological problem. The requestor can track the status of the request and be informed once the issue is resolved. Eco-map can be used across the whole country. With this approach, eco-map collected more than 500 requests from the citizens, that were sent to local authorities. This functionality was also embedded in the StopMusor mobile application, to be more user-friendly and expand the potential target audience.

Events

Offline.

To discover that the root cause of littering hides within the human’s attitude towards waste disposal, we planned a series of events from various angles: ecology, art, and social activism.

Right after the official launch of the campaign, collection of plastic bags in Astana was organized. For bringing plastic bags participants received branded eco-bags, hats, and t-shirts with the project’s logo.

Just in 3 days more than 4000 plastic bags were collected and then directed to the creation of art-exhibition by famous contemporary artist, Saule Suleimenova. Artist created 3×4 meters art-exposition – “Under the sky of Astana” that was fully created from the plastic bags and was placed in the city park attracting many passersby with its idea. Later, the art-exposition was transferred to Almaty, and installed in the popular walking area, thus attracting attention of citizens.

A series of clean-up events were held together with the finalists of popular Miss Almaty contest, National league of volunteers and within the frame of the World Clean-up day.

Together with the beauty contest finalists a clean-up event took place in the premises of historical side Tamgaly Tas, which is overwhelmed with the amount of litter left by the tourists. Additionally, during the World Clean up day, together with the local eco-activists and NGOs about 24 locations were covered by clean-ups in Almaty and Astana engaging more than 1000 people.

In partnership with the State museum of contemporary arts an art-exhibition was held in Almaty during one week, collecting works of more than 30 artists focusing on ecological issues of Kazakhstan. The exhibition also was broadcasted online on the social accounts of popular art-galleries to cover those citizens who could not attend the exhibition physically.

Another remarkable event that was created within the frames of project is Eco-Talks, a platform where ecologists and activists discussed the variety of ecological problems and proposed tangible action plans to solve the problems. Eco-Talks launched with an offline event in Almaty in collaboration with the contemporary theatre ArtiShock, where actors prepared exclusive immersive play, unveiling the portraits of people who contributes to the littering in the cities.

Online.

The main emphasis of the program was focused on online activities, one of them is online school for volunteers, which included live broadcasts with environmentalists, activists and opinion leaders, as well as collection and popularization of ideas aimed at combating littering in the cities among young people.

To engage and hear out the creative minds on the littering problem a contest was organized and held for last year university students on the best idea to combat littering in the cities. The competition was held in the following nominations: innovative project, perspective project, socially significant project, and educational project. As a result, about 30 ideas were collected and shared with the local governmental structures in a form of recommendations. The best 4 ideas were awarded with financial grants for their further implementation.

Continuing the Eco-talks initiative, an online discussion was organized in Astana where local ecological issues were addressed as well as possible ways for its solution engaging representatives of the NGOs, Ministry of the Ecology, and business community.

Among standalone online events, campaign’s timeline was full of eco-swap activities and challenges on a variety of topics, such as plastic-less shopping, separate waste collection, DIY Christmas trees and trash tag challenges.

Banners on billboards/interactive panels

Website (stopmusor.kz), mobile application StopMusor and IG site

Eco-map

Results:

Launched in June 2020 the campaign managed to generate more than 150 media publications and hold 60+ events and activities both offline and online, which allowed to cover more than 3 million people.

Right before program launch together with the sociological agency we conducted a survey among the citizens of Almaty and Astana to measure the baseline of how people understand the problem and its acuteness for the ecology. After 1^st wave of the program, the second identical survey has been conducted to identify how the attitude of the citizens have changed. Results showed that the following indicators have changed and demonstrated that the awareness raising campaign had its impact:

-9% increase in the number of people who do not litter on the streets;

-15% increase in the number of people who believe that human’s indifference to environment is the root cause of littering.

Additional Information

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