We’ve already seen food outlets in the US doing their bit to tackle global hunger with the Halfsies initiative, which donates to charity when customers order half-sized meals. Now a risky advertising campaign cooked up by agency ONIRIA/TBWA has seen two pizzerias in Paraguay provide a deliberately slow service to raise awareness of hunger.

Teaming up with the Food Bank Foundation, the agency persuaded the “two most important pizzerias in Asuncion” to accept delivery requests from customers, advising them that the food would arrive within 45 minutes. Feigning bad service, all the pizzas were delivered much later than this specified time frame, prompting angry calls from those who had placed an order. However, when the food finally arrived, each box came with a note explaining: “When you’re hungry, you understand hunger.” Couriers then told each customer that the pizza was free of charge, but any money they did give would be donated to the Food Bank Foundation to help those for whom hunger is a genuine fear, rather than an irritation. The idea behind the concept was to help those who can afford takeaway food to put their complaint into perspective, in return offering them a pizza for free as a thank you for taking part in the experience. The following video was created by ONIRIA/TBWA to demonstrate the campaign:

Where traditional campaigns may appeal to rational thought or emotion to convince viewers to help, the ONIRIA/TBWA campaign gave pizza customers an unusual experience they are not likely to forget. According to a Fast Company report, the campaign helped collect 50 tons of food for the Food Bank Foundation, but would you be prepared to risk permanently dissatisfying your customers for a single campaign?

Website: www.oniriatbwa.com
Contact: www.oniria.com.py/index.php/contacto

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and it’s also widespread in Paraguay, where some 300,000 families lack adequate housing. Motivated by that fact–and by the severe deforestation that has been wrought upon the land–a local Paraguayan activist has devised a way to create recyclable housing materials without using wood.

Social activist Elsa Zaldívar has found a way to mix loofah, the cucumberlike vegetable that gets dried into a scratchy sponge for use in bathing, along with corn and palm husks into a soup of melted, recycled plastics to form strong, lightweight panels suitable for use in houses and furniture. Loofah are already readily available in Paraguay thanks to a project Zaldívar, as head of nonprofit organization Base ECTA, initiated to empower local women. Working with Zaldívar, industrial engineer Pedro Padrós then devised a machine to combine the vegetable materials and plastics into panels that can be produced with varying strength, flexibility, weight, insulating qualities and colours. The lightweight composite panels are not only easier to handle than lumber or brick, but also much better in an earthquake or other natural catastrophe; if destroyed, they are fully recyclable, too. Combining a melting unit, mixer, extruder and cutting unit, Padrós’ machine can produce a half-metre-wide panel 120 metres long in one hour. Costs have already fallen to less than about USD 3 per square metre, making the material competitive with existing construction materials.

A newly granted Rolex Award will finance a promotion centre, the construction of three model houses and a video that will be used to describe the project, which has already attracted commercial interest as well. One to sponsor, test out, or otherwise get involved in? (Related: Instead of Styrofoam, fungus and rice hulls.)

Website: www.rolexawards.com/en/the-laureates/elsazaldivar-the-project.jsp
Contact: baseecta@baseecta.org.py