It’s unusual for a company with revenue of $18 million to bypass media buys to help spread the word about its products and services, instead depending almost solely on non-paid, public relations efforts.
But TerraCycle isn’t your usual company. Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old Princeton University freshman, the recycling company began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid-worm poop in used soda bottles. From that, one might suspect that TerraCycle would have a business model that’s different from the mainstream.
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Here’s the model: The company creates recycling systems for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste. Anyone can sign up for these programs, called the Brigades, and start sending TerraCycle the waste. TerraCycle then converts the collected waste into a wide variety of products and materials. With more than 20 million people collecting waste in more than 20 countries, TerraCycle has diverted billions of units of waste and used them to create moe than 1,500 different products available at major retailers, ranging from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods Market.
Many of the Brigade programs are executed through partnerships with some big brands such as Frito-Lay, Kraft Foods, Kimberly Clark, Logitech, and L’Oreal. And they’re all promoted largely via TerraCycle’s PR team.
BUTT BRIGADE
In November 2012, TerraCycle started a program with Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. (SFNTC), a subsidiary of Reynolds American.
Sensitive to public opinion about smoking and limited by the FTC on how it can market and advertise, SFNTC has focused on sustainability, according to Seth Moskowitz, director of communications.
“All of our facilities are green powered, and since the 1990s we’ve been working with farmers to reduce pesticide use in growing tobacco,” he says.
One green problem that won’t go away: cigarette litter, mainly used butts that people toss on the ground. In 2009 an America the Beautiful study deemed cigarette butts as the most littered item in the country.
Three years later, SFNTC heard that TerraCycle had developed a process to recycle cigarette butts, as well as the inner foil in cigarette packs and a pack’s outer plastic wrapping. “They found a way to turn all of them into recycled components that could be made into new items,” Moskowitz says. “It’s a great solution.”
SFNTC saw in TerraCycle an opportunity to tackle this problem and add another component to its sustainability program.
So, in June 2012 the company signed on with TerraCycle for what would be called the Cigarette Waste Recycling Program. The program is driven by organizations and individuals who sign-up for free on TerraCycle’s website to become members of the “Cigarette Waste Brigade.” These members collect and ship the waste to TerraCycle.
In turn, TerraCycle would pay for shipping and donate $1 for every pound collected to Keep America Beautiful’s anti-cigarette litter program
PR PUSH
Each of the Brigade programs require comprehensive PR planning, says Albe Zakes, global VP of media relations at TerraCycle. For the cigarette litter program, it took six months to create all of the PR assets needed—press releases, media Q&As and Web pages.
The campaign’s main message: The environmental impact of cigarette litter. Here are some stats used in the PR material:
• Of the 4.5 trillion cigarettes consumed annually, 65% of them are improperly discarded (Keep America Beautiful).
• Nearly 40% of all roadside litter is tobacco related (Keep America Beautiful).
• Cigarette litter is the No. 1 collected item in coastal clean-ups (Ocean Conservancy).
The audience for the message was a change for TerraCycle. Most of its Brigade campaigns attract parents and kids. Those demos were out for this campaign. Instead, media outreach focused on general-interest publications, environmental outlets, blogs, college media and tobacco, hospitality and office facilities trades (think workers congregating outside office front doors to smoke).
Office managers were natural targets, says Stacey Krauss, U.S. public relations manager, TerraCycle. “They’re halfway there already,” she says. “Instead of putting butts into garbage cans, they can put them in a box to us to be recycled.
The team would also target tobacco-centric areas like the Carolinas and Virginia.
CAMPAIGN FIRES UP
The campaign got underway Nov. 14, jumpstarted by an AP exclusive.
The campaign includes several social elements: weekly posts on TerraCycle’s Facebook and Twitter pages highlight the program and earned coverage, linking to a dedicated Cigarette Waste Brigade web page that features up-to-date program stats and instructions on joining. Keep America Beautiful also promotes the program on its social-media channels.
For direct communications, TerraCycle uses existing lists of targets such as anti-litter and beach clean-up groups. Meanwhile, SFNTC’s Moskowitz informs customers via direct mail, while the group’s website (sfntc.com) provides program information.
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
For most PR, Moskowitz defers to TerraCycle. “They’ve been doing a great job, with good media pickup,” he says. However, with good work comes challenges. One of the biggest: Telling the TerraCycle story multiple times with new partners, Krause says.
Another challenge is local outreach. TerraCycle wants to get the word out locally to attract Brigade members, but local pubs need local tie-ins. “It’s like the chicken and the egg,” Zakes says. So sometimes the team will joke with local media—“ You be the tie-in.” Often that works.
One media relations lesson learned for Zakes: After the pilot campaign was launched in Canada, USA Today got wind of it and wanted to run a story. At the time, Zakes was shopping the U.S. exclusive to AP.
“I did everything I could to delay USA Today, but we ended up commenting in a story that ran on its front page,” Zakes says. That ruffled AP’s featthers. The moral of the story: Even when the best press comes along, sometimes you need to take a pass, Zakes says.
Despite the obstacles, so far there have been solid results:
• More than 1 million butts collected
• More than 2,300 collection locations established
• 510 media placements (nearly 628 million impressions), including Agency France Presse, Grist.com, The Washington Post, Tobacco China and Treehugger.com.
In addition, the program has attracted attention overseas with other cigarette manufacturers. Initiatives in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland launched in April, and in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in May, says Zakes.
The cigarette waste recycling program is just one of many campaigns TerraCycle is working on. These initiatives are truly powered by PR, says Michael Waas, global VP, client services and business development at TerraCycle. “Once we get recognition of a program through the media, we draw in new partners and new interest,” Waas says.
The Brigades and PR represent the front end of TerraCycle’s business, Waas says, with the back end being the manufacturing of collected waste into new products. It’s a unique model that, to this day, no other company has been able to duplicate, Waas says.
Why? Scaling these programs to realize significant revenue is a challenge, he says. Right now his team of 10 manages some 50 partnerships, meaning there’s plenty of PR to be done for Zakes, Krauss and Lauren Taylor, director of U.S. public relations.
To keep a handle on multiple projects, PR is deployed using lots of processes based on prior PR campaigns. “We always joke that we could have a finished press release just by naming the brand and the name of program,” says Zakes. “Our initiatives are built around a system that is always being refined.”
And so far, that system appears to be working well. PRN
CONTACT:
Seth Moskowitz, [email protected]; Albe Zakes, [email protected]; Stacey Krauss, [email protected]; Lauren Taylor, [email protected]; Michael Waas, [email protected].
4 Tips to Executing the Perfect PR for Partners
Lauren TaylorBy Lauren Taylor, Director of U.S. PR, TerraCycle
TerraCycle’s partners are some of the largest consumer products companies in the world. In return for sponsoring our recycling programs, they expect world-class ROI, including PR. Working in partnership adds variety and dimension to your outreach. Here are some tips on how to conduct media relations for any partner.
• Treat a partner like a client: Provide all assets and strategy documents in advance; create in-depth PR reports with ROI summarries at the end of any campaign.
• Provide partners with the necessary assets: This way they’ll understand the partnership, stay on message and create their own PR opportunities. We provide Q&A documents to make sure our contacts fully understand how TerraCycle works and the benefits of the recycling program.
• Look for new media categories and focus areas to target: Your outreach opportunities can be expanded through a partnership. For instance, we wouldn’t be able to tell the TerraCycle story to tobacco media if we didn’t have a cigarette manufacturer as a recycling partner.
• Continue to show value: Your partnership may not be a focus for your main contact, so that means you should regularly suggest ideas that will show consumers and media why the program is important.
Cigarette Waste Initiative Goes Global
This global chart shows all media placements covering the Cigarette Waste Brigade during the week of Dec. 17, 2012. The darker shades signify heavier media coverage in that particular country.
Source: TerraCycle