The Trash Island campaign is one of the most beautiful and sophisticated campaigns that we have ever come across. They created their own currency, passports and everything it takes to establish a nation.

THE TRASH ISLES

AMV BBDO claimed the world’s first country made entirely from plastic trash in the ocean so that other countries would be obliged to clean it up.

In the North Pacific there is so much plastic, an area of trash the size of France has formed. Governments have simply ignored it. The LADBible, an online mag, found a way to ensure they couldn’t. By turning the country sized trash patch into an official country. On World Oceans Day, The Plastic Oceans Foundation and LadBible submitted an application to The United Nations to recognize The Trash Isles as an official country. Because if it is recognised as an official country, then other countries are obliged to help clean it up. The campaign created an identity for the country and asked the public to support it by becoming citizens.

At the start of the campaign the issue was rarely talked about and the public were unaware of the issue, by the end of it global new channels such as Fox News, CNN and Europe 1 had covered it, major publications like National Geographic, Reuters and the Daily Mail wrote about it and more than half a billion people had been reached by the campaign.

By turning the country sized trash patch into an official country the campaign not only achieved this but allowed them to understand the scale of the problem.

The campaign was targeted at LADBible’s young, politically active audience – the generation that would have to deal with this problem if not addressed and the wider public who were unaware of the issue. Big name celebrities signed up and helped reach the full range of the audience, there were environmentalists such as Ale Gore and Sir David Attenborough all the way to popular hip hop artist and famous actors such as Pharrell Williams and Chris Hemsworth.