Awareness-raising measures on single-use plastics: comparing communicative strategies in EC websites and social media

Single-use plastics have been listed by the European Commission among the ten plastic products responsible for marine pollution. For this reason, on 28th May 2018 new EU measures were introduced to ban them or, when alternative solutions were not available, to regulate production, labelling requirements and collection targets. Among the rules, there is also the obligation for Member States to “raise consumers’ awareness about the negative environmental impact of littering of single-use plastics” (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/news/single-use-plastics-2018-may-28_en). The scope of this paper is to analyse the language and infographics used in the EC website to explain the necessity of this new EU Directive, while confronting it with pictures and captions aimed at awareness-raising posted on social networks (especially Instagram). Differences and points of contact between institutional communication and communication on social media will be investigated. After some preliminary remarks on text-image relation in a multimodal perspective, the analysis will be carried out with the tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Attention will be focused on Appraisal patterns, attitude, affect and judgment, particularly on the System of Engagement revealed by the ways that “position the speaker/writer with respect to the value position being advanced and with respect to potential responses to that value position» (Martin and White 2005: 36). A relevant area of research will be the semantic fields involved in the metonymical and metaphorical construction of Appraisal Patterns, considered from an ecolinguistic perspective (Stibbe 2015). MARTIN J.R., WHITE P.R.R. 2005, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York. STIBBE, A. 2015, Ecolinguistics. Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live by, Routledge, London and New York.