On 17th March 2014 the Luganville Waste Management team launched their new waste management logo. Tito the green gecko is our new mascot and he will be helping us spread our waste management message around town through national radio, the newspapers, facebook, the churches and the waste collection trucks. With the radio campaign it is hoped that the message will eventually come to be adopted nationwide. Tito's name comes from the rearranged letters of the word 'toti', which is the Bislama word for rubbish. We don't think Tito is rubbish, but he knows his rubbish and wants to tell people all about it.
Tito sits in the middle of a Mobius strip, the internationally known symbol of recycling, and his main message is 'Mekem Stret' which is Bislama for Do the right thing. There are then 5 different messages we are trying to get across which are shown in the graphics below. The concept of reuse, reduce and recycle is not well known in Vanuatu so we are attempting to introduce that in the campaign.
The radio campaign consists of 2 ads with the main message of reduce, reuse, recycle and a liberal dose of gecko vocalisations interspersed at the beginning middle and end of the ads. The common house gecko of Vanuatu has a distinctive chirping sound and we managed to track down a recording of it from a university database in the States, for which they waived the $30 fee to use. You can hear the common house gecko vocalising regularly during the day as they rest on walls and hide in nooks. The idea behind using the call of the gecko on the ad was to provide a trigger for people to think about waste management every time they heard the sound, outside of the radio ad. Pavlovian, but with humans and geckos.
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| Tito the Green Gecko |
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| Mekem Stret - Put your rubbish in the right place. |
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| Mekem Stret - Reduce |
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| Mekem Stret - Reuse |
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| Mekem Stret - Recycle |
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| Mekem Stret - Compost organic waste |
