Brabant’s most famous forest ranger, Frans Kapteijns, is extremely bothered by all the waste that road users throw out of their car windows. But what do you do about that? He came up with the ‘Protected verge’ sign and placed it along the entrance to the A65. Of course, that wasn’t allowed, because you need a permit for that, but it turned out to work. Secretly, the municipality of Tilburg thought it was a good idea, so now it is there anyway. With permission. And at least thirty municipalities now also want the sign.
Frans Kapteijns is a thorn in the side of all that rubbish. “It’s one rubbish dump. I then sat down with communications agency Fama Volat to figure out how we could stop this.”
They thought there should be a sign and it should look official. “We wanted to give the verge a certain status, because we thought that would help. That’s why the sign looks like one that stands at a protected nature reserve.”
When the design was complete, the sign could be placed. No sooner said than done. “As a kind of guerrilla action, we placed it at the entrance to the A65 in Tilburg.” Such a guerrilla action is mainly intended to gain a lot of publicity with few resources. Frans therefore understood that the municipality was asking for to remove the sign. “Rightly of course. We just didn’t have a permit.”
“Now it is completely clean and hopefully it will stay that way.”
But the municipality soon reversed the decision, says councilor Maarten van Asten. “It is of course a very good idea. We want to protect nature and the roadsides and it is also good to make people aware of their living environment.”
Frans is more than happy with that response. “It’s great! Hopefully more municipalities will follow. We collected 263 pieces of waste to install the sign. Now it is completely clean and hopefully it will stay that way.” More than thirty municipalities are now interested in the sign.