Raising public awareness for decades
Raising a public awareness about waste matters does not come from day to day. It has taken years of planning and repeating information about why it is necessary to recycle and sort waste at the source.
Up till 1960s almost all types of waste was dumped at city dumps - official dumps as well as unofficial dumps. However, as the environmental consciousness began rising on a national and international basis, also on a local scale the first initiatives to sorting waste was taken.
In 1988 the first recycling stations was build, and it didn't take many years for the citizens of Odense to get used to bringing their bulky waste to the recycling stations.
In 2002 we started collecting paper separately at kerbside, and the citizens quickly got into the habit of putting their newspapers, magazines etc. in this container and placing it at the kerbside every fortnight.
We used the medias intensely to draw attention to every new service and new improvement for the environment. And we have spend many years of waste communication telling the message that waste is precious, and that we must not let future generations pay for our sins by polluting the earth unnecessarily because of bad waste habits. With a mixture of interpersonal communication and mass communication, we constantly raise the awareness among the citizens of Odense.
