Corona Canada is continuing its commitment to the environment with a campaign featuring a floating billboard that’s now collecting plastic waste from the St. Lawrence River.

In Boucherville, Quebec, the billboard is floating in the river and has a skimmer attached to the bottom. This draws water toward the board, catching all solid or liquid waste floating on the surface, be it biomass, plastic bottles, cigarette butts, packaging, microplastics, hydrocarbons and more. The billboard will be in the river till Oct.19.

The beer brand has also created an online tool, the Corona Plastic Challenge, to help Canadians discover their own plastic pollution footprint along with tips on how to reduce single plastic use. In creating the campaign, Corona worked with Ocean Wise, a Vancouver-based global organization focused on three major ocean challenges – overfishing, ocean pollution, and climate change. In addition to collecting waste from the St. Lawrence River, the campaign will provide the team at Ocean Wise with information that can be used to help quantify how much plastic pollution is flowing through the St. Lawrence River.

Mike Bascom, senior marketing director, Corona Canada, says, “As a brand that was born at the beach, Corona is invested in helping to protect Canada’s natural environment, which is why we continue to launch initiatives – like the Plastic Collecting Billboard – to help educate and encourage Canadians to take action to reduce their plastic pollution.”

The St. Lawrence River was selected as the location based on its role as the connecting waterway from the Great Lake system to the Atlantic Ocean, meaning the plastic pollution found in the St. Lawrence River can flow directly into the Atlantic Ocean. Based on a 2021 statistic from Science Advances, 80% of ocean plastic comes from 1,000+ rivers, globally, that feed into the ocean.

Corona Canada’s billboard is just one of the brand’s global environmental initiatives to keep waste from flowing into oceans. Corona has launched river interception programs in Indonesia and Ecuador and is in the process of building infrastructure to do so in Guatemala in 2023. Last year, Corona Canada piloted a new type of packaging for six-pack beer bottles, becoming the first global beverage brand to use 30% surplus barley straw and 70% recycled paper fibres to create an innovative cardboard packaging solution.

Corona Canada partnered with Anomaly who managed creative, Veritas who is managing PR and Dentsu who is managing media.