We would like your support with our poster free campaign. Open letter here 

Councillor contacts, MEP contacts, TD contacts

This May, we are calling on all candidates to avoid the use of single use plastics this election by running a poster free campaign, adopting alternative advertising/marketing mediums instead. With single use plastics and climate change in both the national and European media spotlight, this is a great opportunity to show your commitment to the environment by aligning your actions with your green agenda/policy.

Corrugated plastic, commonly known as Corriboard is the material of choice for election posters. Like other single use plastics, they take 400+ years to biodegrade. In the 2014 local elections, 2038 candidates ran for 765 seats. An estimated 611,000 posters were erected with a combined cost of €3M with posters covering the equivalent area of 23 Croke Parks. This produced 366 tonnes of Co2, the equivalent of driving an average car non stop for 592 days. In many areas, these posters were a safety and driving hazard, often obscuring important road signage. After 30 days of canvassing, the majority of these posters were sent to landfill.

We are encouraging candidates to communicate and cooperate with other candidates in their electoral area to establish a voluntary poster ban. We ask candidates to coordinate with Tidy Town committees and environmental groups to make a poster free election a reality.  In a 2018 Claire Byrne Live/Amárach Research poll, 77% of respondents said that they thought the use of posters during election campaigns should be banned. Thanks to collaboration between Tidy Towns, Environmental Groups and Local Councillors, nine areas around Ireland already have poster free agreements in place. This positive reception to poster free zones and decisive survey results reflect the public’s growing environmental interest and appetite for a poster free election.

Together, with your support, we can create a poster free election. Please pledge your support to our campaign. Visit posterfree.ie for more info on the campaign.

For live updates follow us on our social media sites (linked on posterfree.ie)