Tene Turns Georgia's Junk Car Culture Into a Plastic Recycling Movement
Tene's Plastic Junk Car is an experiential, integrated, and OOH outdoor campaign created by Georgian agency Leavingstone and published in Georgia in May 2023, transforming the country's culturally iconic scrap-metal collection vehicles into mobile plastic recycling stations that exchanged collected plastic for eco-friendly USB cables.
Tene is the first-ever Georgian recycling company, founded in 2021 to fight plastic pollution and raise environmental awareness, according to clapboard.com. The brand identified a structural gap in Georgian civic life: plastic waste was accumulating without a culturally legible solution. In Georgia, the junk car — a roaming vehicle that collects scrap metal from households — carries deep social recognition, having become the subject of memes, Coubs, and TikTok content across the country. Leavingstone's strategic insight was to transplant this familiar ritual into the domain of plastic collection, giving Georgian citizens an immediately understandable, participation-ready mechanism for recycling.
The campaign's objective was twofold. First, it aimed to raise awareness of plastic waste as an environmental crisis. Second, and more ambitiously, it sought to introduce a culture of collecting and recycling plastic into the everyday routines of Georgian people. Rather than relying on instructional messaging or paid media, the Plastic Junk Car operated as a living demonstration: a vehicle that moved through communities, accepted plastic, and rewarded participation with a tangible eco-friendly product. The campaign ran with a reported zero-dollar media spend, as documented by clapboard.com and corroborated by Creative-Stories Com Ua. Clapboard has assigned the campaign a score of 77 out of 100, recognising its cultural intelligence and structural originality within the 2023 Georgian advertising landscape.
Leavingstone identified the junk car as Georgia's most potent untapped communications vehicle. The scrap-metal collector is not merely a service in Georgia — it is a cultural institution, embedded in neighbourhood soundscapes and social media vernacular alike. By appropriating that institution for plastic collection, the agency bypassed the need for conventional awareness-building entirely, letting a familiar behaviour carry an unfamiliar environmental message.
The strategic foundation rested on a single alarming statistic: one Georgian citizen produces 42.6 kilograms of plastic waste annually, as reported by clapboard.com. That figure positioned individual behaviour, not industrial process, as the primary lever for change — and made a citizen-facing, participation-driven mechanic the logical campaign format. The exchange mechanism, offering eco-friendly USB cables in return for plastic, placed the campaign firmly within the electronics and technology category, connecting environmental responsibility to a functional consumer product that Georgian households already value.
In the broader competitive context, global recycling initiatives from brands such as TerraCycle and local municipal programmes have historically struggled to achieve voluntary, high-volume participation without significant paid media investment. The Plastic Junk Car campaign's zero-spend model stands in direct contrast to those approaches, demonstrating that cultural relevance can function as a distribution channel in its own right. Georgia's regulatory environment adds further strategic urgency: the country's framework sets recycling and recovery targets reaching 90% by a defined future date, according to Matsne Gov Ge, and EU alignment goals documented by eu4environment.org create institutional pressure that Tene is structurally positioned to serve. The campaign therefore operated simultaneously as a brand-building exercise and as a demonstration of Tene's operational credibility to prospective institutional partners.
Leavingstone constructed the Plastic Junk Car as an experiential OOH object before it was anything else. The physical vehicle — modelled on Georgia's recognisable scrap-metal collectors — was adapted to receive plastic rather than metal, and outfitted with the visual and sonic cues that Georgian citizens associate with the junk car phenomenon. The creative decision to replicate the junk car's aesthetic fidelity was deliberate: any deviation would have broken the cultural recognition that gave the campaign its frictionless entry point.
Creative direction was led by Lasha D. Kotori as Creative Director, with Levan Lepsveridze serving as Creative Chairman and Anze Jereb as Chief Creative Officer at Leavingstone, according to creative-stories.com.ua and clapboard.com. Matassi Sulakauri served as Design Lead and Art Director, with Nutsa Kakulia as Junior Art Director contributing to the visual system. Copywriting was handled by Sopo Lomineishvili and Ratexandre, both credited as Junior Copywriters. Production was overseen by Lilu Urushadze as Producer, with Anika Gavasheli serving as Head of the Advertising Unit, as documented by clapboard.com.
The integrated dimension of the campaign extended beyond the vehicle itself. The 2,500 USB cables produced through the campaign — each a direct output of the plastic collected — functioned as branded artefacts that circulated in Georgian households long after the Plastic Junk Car had moved on. This closed-loop creative logic, in which the campaign's waste input became its reward output, gave the execution a coherence that purely experiential campaigns rarely achieve. The documentary and social experiment framing, noted by clapboard.com, ensured that the campaign generated its own content layer: citizens sharing encounters with the Plastic Junk Car across social platforms amplified reach without additional spend.
The Plastic Junk Car campaign delivered measurable results that, according to clapboard.com and creative-stories.com.ua, surpassed all internal expectations. Ten tons of plastic were collected during the campaign's first week alone. Tene brand interaction increased by a reported 500%, and brand reach increased by a reported 1,000%, according to icomagencies.com. The campaign produced 2,500 USB cables and is reported to have saved an estimated 4,500 years of landfill space, as documented by clapboard.com and creative-stories.com.ua. All of this was achieved with a reported media spend of zero dollars.
The campaign's most consequential outcome was institutional rather than purely metric-driven. The visibility generated by the Plastic Junk Car helped Tene win a European Union tender, providing funding to purchase a scaled vehicle the team now refers to as the Plastic Junk Truck, according to clapboard.com. That outcome transforms the campaign from an awareness exercise into a growth event — one that materially expanded Tene's operational capacity and geographic ambitions across Georgia.
On the awards circuit, the campaign was shortlisted at the Kyiv International Advertising Festival in 2023 in the Creative Communications category, specifically under Integrated and Innovation for Small Budget Campaigns, according to Briefsandworks Ge. The campaign also received recognition at Ad Black Sea in 2023, though specific award categories and levels could not be independently verified from available records. No verified records exist for entries at Cannes Lions, D&AD, or The One Show. The Clapboard Score of 77 out of 100 reflects the campaign's strong cultural integration and zero-budget effectiveness, offset by limited independent third-party metric verification.
The Plastic Junk Car is an experiential, integrated, and OOH outdoor campaign created by Leavingstone for Tene in Georgia in May 2023. It repurposed Georgia's culturally iconic scrap-metal collection vehicles to collect plastic waste instead, offering participants eco-friendly USB cables in exchange. The campaign ran with a reported zero-dollar media budget.
The Plastic Junk Car collected 10 tons of plastic during its first week of operation in Georgia. This figure is reported by clapboard.com and creative-stories.com.ua and represents the campaign's primary environmental output, alongside the production of 2,500 USB cables made from or exchanged for the collected material.
Leavingstone, a Georgian advertising agency, created the Plastic Junk Car campaign for Tene. Key credits include Creative Chairman Levan Lepsveridze, Chief Creative Officer Anze Jereb, and Creative Director Lasha D. Kotori, as documented by creative-stories.com.ua and clapboard.com. The campaign was published in Georgia in May 2023.
The Plastic Junk Car was shortlisted at the Kyiv International Advertising Festival in 2023 under Integrated and Innovation for Small Budget Campaigns, according to briefsandworks.ge. It also received recognition at Ad Black Sea in 2023, though specific award levels were not independently verified. No records exist for Cannes Lions or D&AD entries.
The campaign's demonstrated impact — collecting 10 tons of plastic in one week and generating a reported 500% increase in brand interaction, according to clapboard.com — helped Tene win a European Union tender. The EU funding was used to purchase a larger vehicle, now called the Plastic Junk Truck, enabling nationwide expansion across Georgia.
Tene is the first-ever Georgian recycling company, founded in 2021 to combat plastic pollution and raise environmental awareness, according to clapboard.com. Operating in Georgia's emerging recycling sector, Tene's core business involves collecting plastic waste. The Plastic Junk Car campaign, launched in May 2023, remains its most publicly documented initiative.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
