Signals

Belgium – Fashion Revolution, the global movement championing reform in the fashion industry, has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the environmental cost of e-commerce.

The Highway Fitting campaign is an attempt to make consumers stop and consider the environmental impact of their shopping habits. According to Fashion Revolution, 40% of clothing bought online is sent back to the retailer. This overuse of free returns policies is putting a particular strain on both the environment and brands by increasing last-mile delivery traffic.

‘Instead of the two-way drive of a delivery van bringing a package to you, it now has to drive back to your house to return it to the retailer,’ says Chloé Mikolajczak, country coordinator of Fashion Revolution Belgium. ‘On a global scale, this has a massive impact on the environment and traffic.’

Brands and retailers are also looking to curb the rise of serial returns, with UK retailers such as Asos and Harrods now taking steps to blacklist shoppers who regularly buy, wear and return items.

UK – Vegetables are being touted as the enemy in a playful ad campaign designed to get kids to eat their greens.

Created by food marketing fund Veg Power and tv channel ITV, Eat Them To Defeat Them aims to improve the health of children and teenagers by turning eating vegetables into battle play. In a bid to inspire better eating, the tongue-in-cheek advert enlists the help of children to help stop vegetables from taking over the world. Backed by an alliance of 11 supermarkets, including Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose, the national campaign was created with support from advertising agency adam&eve/DDB.

According to Veg Power, 80% of kids and 96% of teenagers in the UK do not eat enough vegetables. Meanwhile, according to some estimates, up to one third of primary schoolchildren are overweight or obese. Such health and weight concerns are being exacerbated by the daily pressure and confusion parents face as they navigate today’s food and snacking landscape. In a dedicated Opinion piece, Beth Bentley, global vice-president of strategy at Virtue Worldwide, discusses why brands play a crucial role in demystifying children’s nutrition.

Teenagers who are almost constantly online are just as likely to socialise with their friends face to face, according to a new study of 13–17-year-olds by Pew Research Center. Contrary to popular opinion, highly connected teens are spending more time with their friends than their lesser-connected peers. Specifically, 24% of teens who report being online almost constantly are meeting their friends in person every day or almost every day, compared to 23% of teens who are online less frequently.

With young people maintaining face-to-face contact with their friends, this points to the opportunity for physical spaces that are targeted at younger people. With a lack of recognised leisure spaces to frequent, coffee shops have become a comfortable space for teenagers. However, with Costa Coffee rolling out a policy to ask young customers for ID when ordering products containing caffeine, our latest Opinion piece argues that high streets are in need of new, youth-focused social spaces.