New Don’t Mess with Texas campaign features “designer litterbags”

nicolrenee, says:

Oh, this is great! I love my tax dollars going toward designer trash sacks for kids. So THAT'S why my property taxes have skyrocketed over the past two years!

Hey, the good news is that if you visit the site, you too can be the recipient of a designer trash sack and a bumper strip, all without leaving the safety and comfort of your house.

What's more, elsewhere on the site you can report the litterbugs you see as you are driving around town. Seriously! They won't get a ticket, but they will get a lovely letter reminding them of the Texas Litter Laws and a free designer trash sack.

Honestly, I do love that part. If you can't fight the litterers, then annoy the dickens out of them, right?

Don't get me wrong, I am all about cleaning up the state and keeping the trash off the roads. I volunteer doing trash pickup at the lake, recycle, try to generate as little trash as possible. Maybe I am getting old, but I fail to see how printing designer trash sacks for kids (okay, young adults) will help with the effort.

Actually rasing the kids right in the first place so that they understand the world is not their trash can will make a bigger impact for a longer period of time and in the long run for less money. How about mandatory ecology classes in school? How about mandatory recycling within the schools and offering free recycling bins to ALL Texans instead of those in certain cities or neighborhoods? How about bottle deposits in Texas to ensure recycling? Why don't we try the things that have worked best across the country rather than trying to create the wheel all over again? Just a thought...

luniz, says:

I'm sorry but "mandatory ecology classes in school"? Don't kid yourself. And recycling bins at home isn't going to help either, this is about trash on roads. These aren't "designer" trash sacks they're probably just cheap bags with an image printed on them. Lighten up a little bit.

nicolrenee, says:

In my semi-humble opinion, helping people understand why tossing one's trash on the road is a bad idea has to begin at home, or at least under the influence of someone empowered to make a difference, like a teacher. So many kids spend more time with their teachers than they do with their parents anyway. My point is that if you catch kids when they are young, get them involved and interested, get the communities participating in keeping things clean and then provide trash bins at convenient locations throughout the city (see downtown Austin for a good example) then things tend to stay a lot cleaner. When you don't attack a problem at its source, all you do is treat a symptom and never rid yourself of the actual 'illness'.

Why I ridicule the 'designer bags' is that it is a poor way of treating a symptom, will not result in a cure and is as I see it a complete waste of time. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.

...not to mention my amusement at the old fogeys in marketing. If they think that making 'limited edition collector trash bags' really is going to reach today's youth, then they must have been sitting in the vicinity of that huge warehouse fire that consumed the 2 tons of marijuana. Silly, really.

Still, I like the bumper sticker that tells folks to keep their butts off the streets...

Just an opinion. Like fish, they tend to stink after a few days in the sun. (-:

twisteddog, says:

I'd love to see the statistics driving this Rock the Bag initiative (or is it a South Park episode?). I think kids are generally far more on top of recycling than their parents. Every major rock fest, bmx event or gamer convention seems to have a recycling arm. They certainly not the ones I see winging McDonald's bags out their car window or leaving used diapers in parking lots.

Teaching ecology as part of the science curriculum surely happens already, doesn't it? It's pretty essential to an understanding of the physical sciences. Using environmentalism as the basis for lab activities (composting, for example) would be a good way to teach both.

nicolrenee, says:

I haven't denied that they are trying to 'catch them when they are young', just scoff at the idea that their campaign is going to achieve the desired result.

As for the bag, having worked in a couple of different industries where costing out bags was a piece of my job, I can tell you from experience that handing out clear or black bags or even solid blue recycling bags with no logo is one heck of a lot cheaper than handing out bags with a 4 color print logo, each with their own custom dye that had to be machined for them. Even taking into account bulk purchasing volume and the possibility that due to the quantity of printed materials being ordered that they might have thrown in the cost of machining the dyes for free, make no mistake, a lot of money went into this collector bag campaign that could have been spent more wisely on a more permanent solution. Heck, having trash receptacles where the people are (bus stops, near street corners, shopping districts, downtown, other high traffic areas) and have the trash regularly collected and cans in greater quantities and more closely spaced so that they are convenient to walk to would be more effective for TXDOT as a clean up campaign. Using that particular idea, if they wanted to really involve the youth, they could hold a trash receptacle logo design contest involving the taggers, let them spray paint the receptacles with creative designs (with some guidelines, of course), post pictures of the designs online with a poll for people to be able to vote on their favorite design, and have the winner of the contest get some sort of a prize.

It isn't the wealthy suburbs that have trash issues by and large, it is the inner city, the impoverished areas, and for whatever reasons, places all along the freeway. The only other time one generally sees mountains of trash are in places where people gather for festivities and/or fun, like concerts, festivals, parks or lakes. Given that, one has to think about the target audience. Well, they got the festivity crowd, but missed out completely on everyone else. That is a large audience to not reach.

I'm not saying I know best, I am not saying I know everything, but I am saying it doesn't take a marketing genius to see that this particular campaign is no going to achieve optimal results. There are better ways of distributing that particular piece of taxpayer pie, and honestly, I wish they had. A little late to be whining about it now, granted, but no one asked me when it would have been more productive to do so (come to think of it, no one ever asked me at all, but I'm not shy about volunteering an opinion when I feel strongly about something). So, I get to whine now.

Just a girl with an opinion, nothing more, nothing less.

luniz, says:

How do you know they didn't have a contest for this logo design? Optimal results? What's that?

>>We want to get young people interested in using a litterbag instead of throwing trash on Texas rights-of-way," said Doris Howdeshell, Travel Division Director for TXDoT.

You don't think this can get the idea across to young drivers that "hey instead of chucking my McDs coke out the window, I can put it in a bag and throw it away later"? Does it have to completely prevent every single person in the city from littering to have an impact?

nicolrenee1968, says:

Why touch five people when you can touch five hundred for the same amount of money? No, it doesn't have to completely prevent every person from littering to have an impact, but since it is MY money and YOUR money they are spending, personally I would rather have each of my dollars go as far as possible, get the most bang for the buck. I apply that same philosophy to money I personally spend. I earned it with my time, and I want my time to be considered as valuable to other people as it is to me.

TxDOT does do other things that are spectacular, such as offering scholarships, offering classroom education resources that are unfortunately not as widely known about as they should be, and who really can forget the 'Don't Mess With Texas' media campaign?

What I recognize is that where some campaigns have had fabulous results which I completely support and some efforts go far toward achieving their goal. In my humble opinion (everyone has one, I know), this bag campaign is not going to be the campaign that will achieve the optimal result for the dollars spent. I stand behind my words.

If I didn't have the sweat equity and research time to back my words, believe me, I wouldn't bother to express them.

You are free to differ. Only time will tell whether this program flops or not, and given that it is already rolling, what I personally think about it has just about as much significance as what I plan to eat for dinner. Like I said, I only offer up an opinion...well reasoned, backed by facts and logic, but it is only an opinion, one of many out there, which you are free to take as your own or not as you so choose. I do love a free society.

luniz, says:

Well to be honest, I don't really give a flip about the whole thing anyway. I have a tough time worrying about what's probably a drop in the bucket, tax dollar-wise, when I know Dick Cheney's probably eating lobster and caviar stuffed babies on my nickel for lunch every day. I don't know how anybody could ever statistically/objectively analyze the success of this program anyway, it just seemed overly negative to denounce the whole thing because the logos are "lame". Thanks for taking the time to reply and discuss the topic though without just name calling and such. Heck maybe the company that prints the bags is owned by whoever decided to spend money on the project and it's all a scam.