FUTURE LANDFILL

When my kids were given some free Lion King “Ooshies” from Australian supermarket Woolworths, I held them in my hand and wondered where are these things going to end up? Isn’t the moral of The Lion King all about “the circle of life”?

So, I decided to do something about it. With a couple of good mates (the brilliant Tom Whitty and photographer Stu Morley) we went and shot these Lion King figurines in their natural habitat- not the beautiful plains of the Serengeti, but in landfill.

We set up a simple website, linked to a petition calling on supermarkets to stop their evil plastic promotions, and put the images onto the internet. Fair to say, it went absolutely nuts. Tens of thousands of shares, stacks of articles all over the world, and I did a bunch of TV, radio and podcast interviews about it.

A few people said that it was easy to have a go at the supermarkets, but what else could they have done? Well, we thought they could have done Lion King collectable cards printed on card embedded with seeds. We sent it to Woolies asking for their opinion, and got a typical, colour-by-numbers response…

However, a week later Woolworths announced that they were going to base their next promotion around seeds. What a coincidence! ;)

We ended up getting almost 15,000 signatures on a petition calling for Woolworths and Coles to stop these sort of promotions… and guess what ended up happening… After lots of complaints at their AGMs, both of the big supermarket chains put an end to these promotions. You see, people power can change EVERYTHING! We spent $35 hosting the website. They spent MILLIONS upon MILLIONS on their promotions… but a little bit of pressure made all the difference.