Portland's Latest Recycling Efforts Start at Your Own Kitchen Table

Portlanders may have heard by now of Portland Composts!, the City of Portland’s new food scrap pilot program. Two thousand homes in four neighborhoods in Portland were selected to move to every-other-week garbage collection and weekly collection of food scraps. Coates Kokes was enlisted to handle both collateral design and PR for this launch.
 
The advertising work included working on an overall look and feel, coming up with a tagline/rallying cry for the program and designing a set of collateral. For the collateral pieces, we chose to go with a hip yet instructional look so that the materials were fresh, but still appeared important. These were given to the pilot program participants to inform them of how to compost, how the collection schedule was changing and the benefits of this change.

On the PR side of things, Coates Kokes worked with the City of Portland on a media event that took place in a Portland resident’s home. Mayor Sam Adams and celebrity Master Recycler, Heather Hawkins showed the media how to compost, what could and couldn’t be put into the new pail and told them why this program is important and beneficial to Portlanders. The turnout was fantastic—all four major Portland TV stations covered the pilot launch as well as print and radio outlets. Plus, we got these super cool Portland Composts! aprons.