Horizon Europe research projects are always looking for new ways to share their brand and to boost the reach of their communication activities. Typical items that projects create include branded tshirts and roller banners. They both work really well at in-person events where they give a really clear sense of the project brand and help to make it obvious who works in the project, and that an event is connected to the project.

But are they a good use of resources given that they’re often only used a few times each year at project events? Not only that, but European research projects typically only last three to five years and a (well-made) tshirt or roller banner should last much longer than that. So, what happens to all these branded items? In my wardrobe at home, I now have 7 project tshirts and half of those are from H2020 projects which finished years ago. I try to make an effort to wear them, so they don’t feel like a complete waste; and I know lots of colleagues do the same, using them as pyjamas or clothes they don’t mind getting dirty when they garden or decorate their house.

But it doesn’t feel like a very circular economy decision to print new tshirts and roller banners for every project, especially as a lot of them are going to end up wasted in just a few years. And as a reminder, the environmental impacts from the textile industry are huge – especially in terms of water use and pollution of freshwater from the dyeing process. That left us thinking, if we choose not to buy new things, how should we publicise ourselves at events?

Our new idea

In the CircleUp project we’ve adopted the circular-economy principle of re-use to see if we can rethink the way projects brand themselves. We’ve decided to experiment with two new approaches – an ink stamp and a project tablecloth – to see if they help us still share our message whilst reducing the amount of waste we produce.

The ink stamp is a custom rubber stamp with the project logo which can be used with both paper and fabric inks allowing us to stamp our logo on to books, documents, tshirts, tote bags and anything else we can get our hands on. In theory, this means that we can reduce our waste by using tshirts we already own or buying 2nd hand tshirts to stamp so that we don’t create demand for new textiles. It also gives each member of the consortium the chance to brand clothes and objects that suit their style rather than us all wearing the same generic baggy tshirts. We also did our best to source our stamps and ink from a local small business which puts a lot of thought into how they source the wood and rubber for their stamps to minimise their environmental impact.

And it worked! … at least kind of.

At our plenary meeting in Bottrop, Germany, last autumn, we put the stamps to use, giving new life to tshirts and bags that we already owned. And some of the tshirts that we made look great! But it wasn’t a complete success. The stamps didn’t work perfectly on every type of fabric and some people have had problems with the ink fading over time. The logo is also much smaller than would be typical on a printed tshirt so it might not give us the same recognition boost at events than a new tshirt would.

We also printed a project tablecloth, a big square of fabric with the project logo. The idea was that the tablecloth would be more versatile than a roller banner and because it just has the logo on it, there’s no risk that the information on it will go out of date, allowing us to use it for the whole project. It’s been a great success so far and has been especially helpful when we take photos of the whole consortium, or to give us a branding boost at conferences and events.

What next?

It’s hard to know what to think about our branding experiment. On one hand, it’s been a success. We’ve created some great branded objects that will help us to spread the message of the project and hopefully without us creating too much waste at the same time. On the other hand, it hasn’t been a completely flawless process and there are definitely trade-offs from having new things professionally printed.

At the end of the day, there’s also the question of whether we need any of this “stuff” at all. Perhaps all the effort we’ve put into trying to reduce the negative environmental impact of the objects was a distraction and we should have spent more time considering whether we needed them in the first place. However eco-friendly our stamp is, it will always be better for the environment just to create nothing at all. But it will be less impactful in every sense, not only environmentally but also in terms of the projects communication impact.

It's clear that we don't have all the answers so we’d love to hear what you think. What do you do in your projects? Are tshirts and rollerbanners just an old-fashioned idea of how to do project communications? Or is there still a way to make them work without damaging our planet?