HOW TO CREATE AN EYE-CATCHING & ENGAGING EVENT TABLE DISPLAY

Tools
Written By Eve Fox

Having an engaging educational table at local events such as Earth Day celebrations, sustainability fairs, and farmer’s markets is an important way to build your volunteer base and engage with your community on why plastic reduction is important to public health, environmental justice and slowing climate change.

Beyond Plastics Greater Boston’s founder, Eileen Ryan with a local legislator at a recent event

👀 CAPTURE PEOPLE’S ATTENTION

Having catchy visuals and hands-on material will get people to stop at your table.

Making good, bright signs is critical! Below are a few ideas to get you started:

  • By The Numbers. Consider creating a board with various types of plastic items affixed to it paired with statistics about how many of that type of item are used and discarded each year.

  • Timeline of Plastic. Consider creating a poster that charts the tremendous increase of plastic production since the 1950’s to help put our consumption and disposal into perspective. Don’t forget to include the industry’s projections through 2050 to really open folks’ eyes.

  • We’re Eating Credit Cards! Consider creating a sign focused on the fact that we are all ingesting roughly a credit card’s worth of plastic particles each week. You could draw a big credit card with a bite taken out of it or trace a human head and chest and glue some credit cards (not real ones, obviously - but we can’t be the only ones who regularly receive fake plastic cards in the mail - hang on to a few of them for this purpose) to the stomach area. You could also take a plastic single-use plate and glue one of these cards to it with a plastic fork.

  • Problem/Solution. Consider creating a display made up of common problem items paired with reusable/refillable alternatives to get people thinking about solutions to single-use packaging.

🫳 HANDS-ON DISPLAYS

People of all ages love to touch things. Here are a few ideas of hands-on displays you may want to create:

Worst Packaging Offenders: Set aside a section of your table to highlight a few items that came packaged in wildly excessive single-use packaging - if you order from Amazon, that will make it easy to hold on to some of the crazy packaging. Toys also frequently come packaged in lawyers of hard plastic and ties that are very hard to remove and totally unnecessary.

Refillable Cleaners: Invest in a set of refillable cleaning products to give people a sense of how easy it is to get away from products packaged in single-use plastic bottles.

Refillable or Plastic Free Personal Care Products: There are great options for everything from toothpaste tabs and powders to razors to shampoo bars to refillable deodorant and more. Put together a little display to get people thinking about making these changes in their own lives (but watch it closely so your products don’t all walk way from the booth).

Gallatin Valley volunteer dressed as Plastic Bag Monster

Plastic-Free Lunch: Anyone with kids or who brings their lunch to work will be interested in seeing a selection of reusable and plastic-free options including to-go-ware, sandwich bags, lunch bags, and containers. Check out our Reuse Revolution guide for suggestions.

🛍️ 👗DRESS UP!

Many organizations find that having one of their members dress as a plastic bag monster is also an arresting tactic that causes passersby to stop and talk for a few minutes. Consider creating a sign explaining that most Americans use 531 single-use plastic bags per year for your bag monster to hold and walk around with.

✍️📱CAPTURE PEOPLE’S CONTACT INFORMATION

Many people, however, will only stop by for a few minutes at the most so it’s important to make it easy for them to sign up for your email list (ideally electronically so that you don’t have to decipher handwriting, sign onto a petition and to take information with them to review later. This is where QR codes come in handy - create a QR code and include it on your printed materials to allow people to scan your materials on their phones and sign your petition or join your email list right then and there. You can make QR codes for fee at bit.ly

We’ve assembled key materials under each major policy solution that we advocate for, as well as general education.

📋PROVIDE MATERIALS PEOPLE CAN TAKE WITH THEM

To determine what to print for your event table, look under the heading that fits the solution you are advocating for. To minimize printing please add a QR code to the document or print a QR code on a separate page to display beside the document. You can make free QR codes at www.bitly.com.

PRO TIP: Make sure that any materials provide a way to find your organization online and to sign up for your email list.

Beyond Plastics Greater Boston lead Eileen Ryan as photographed by Guy Holt

1. GENERAL EDUCATION / PLASTICS 101

2. SINGLE-USE PLASTIC BANS

3. SKIP THE STUFF OR STRAWS-UPON-REQUEST

4. EXTENDED PRODUCER RESPONSIBILITY FOR PACKAGING (EPR)

5. “Chemical Recycling” (false solutions to plastic pollution)

Eve Fox
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HOW TO CREATE A PETITION