Googly eyes and a blue bin: Meet Loop, Chicago’s new recycling mascot

Thirty years ago, if you were using a Microsoft product, chances are you’re familiar with Clippy. The animated “assistant” was little more than a paperclip with a pair of eyebrows framing its googly eyes, popping up in the corner of your screen asking, “Would you like help?”

No! Go away!

But maybe you were tempted to let Clippy stay, like a digital pet that had quietly wandered over to express curiosity before settling in to keep you company.

I was recently reminded of Clippy when I came across a photo of a blue recycling bin called Loop. He has a pair of begloved arms and, yes, googly eyes. In short, he is a recycling mascot for Chicago.

The photo was posted to social media on April 1. Was this an April Fool’s joke? When I reached out to the Department of Streets and Sanitation, I was informed Loop is real. Loop is real!

Loop was created by Güd Marketing for a recycling awareness campaign that includes billboards and videos called “Feed the Cart” for Chicago and neighboring municipalities.

“We pitched the mascot in response to some of the research we had collected,” says Güd creative director Drew Smith. “Chicago has a pretty good recycling rate, but there was a plateau on the goals they were trying to reach, so we wanted to address that decreased enthusiasm. The research also showed there was some confusion on the rules — people putting things in the recycling bins that weren’t actually recyclable. So we thought why not do a kooky, fun mascot that gets people motivated and educated?”

The Güd team originally considered anthropomorphizing a piece of recyclable paper as the mascot.

“But then we were thinking about curbside bins and making sure people knew what would go in those to satisfy the ‘hunger’ for recyclables, so it made more sense that the curbside bins look like a fella with a mouth,” he said.

They even devised a personality for him: “Friendly, excitable and a little silly. He speaks in upbeat, simple and straightforward language to let you know what he can and can not eat.”

Can slapping googly eyes on an inanimate object actually be effective from a psychological standpoint?

“This is deceptively effective!” says James Mourey, a marketing professor at DePaul University.

“Beyond novelty — which captures attention — actively anthropomorphizing something, even a recycling bin, taps into empathy, emotion and perceived warmth, which can trigger greater recycling behavior. It sounds silly, but it’s all in the realm of ‘nudges,’ or the subtle ways in which we sort of hijack what we know about human cognition and emotion to elicit a certain behavior.”

Anthropomorphism means attributing human characteristics to non-human objects. What a strange compulsion. And yet it’s one to which we’re all susceptible.

“We know from neuroscience research that the brain responds to the shape of a face,” Mourey says. “So anytime you get two eyes and a mouth, we’re there. Why the eyes are googly (on many mascots), I don’t know! But the use of eyes is a simple cue that something is alive, there’s a face there, and we’re designed to see that. So anything where we get two eyes and a mouth, we respond.”

He described a study involving a poster that consisted of two horizontal lines, like dashes, which were eyes, and then a third, longer line below it, which was a mouth.

“They took that poster and left it in a room where people were doing math questions. And for the control group, they took the same poster and turned it 90 degrees, so it no longer looked like a face, it just looked like three random vertical lines. And what they found, when it was oriented like a face, it actually reduced cheating. So just the imagined presence of a face led people to cheat less.”

According to Mourey, we treat things differently when we think they’re alive.

“If you describe something using pronouns — referring to the recycling bin mascot as ‘he’ rather than ‘it’ — that contextualizes it as a living thing. It’s a signal. It all speaks to priming behavior, where you’re trying to change the way people are processing information. There’s this idea that we assess people on two dimensions: Their competence and their warmth. By nudging or priming people with these human-like cues, then that shifts us more into the warmth dimension. In this case, it makes recycling seem warmer.”

Without the mascot, “you’re just recycling,” he says. “The thing about Loop as a character, now you’re feeding the bin. And that might be problematic because you might decide to throw everything in that bin.”

Actually, Güd thought of that when creating the mascot’s personality: “The only time he’s negative is when he’s offered food that gives him heartburn or upsets his stomach,” says Smith. “Things like batteries, definitely a no-no for Loop.”

Anthropomorphizing doesn’t always achieve the intended effect. M&M’s, the candy, also exist as characters: Arms, legs, a mouth and googly eyes. “I remember my godmother, she could not eat M&M’s after watching those commercials, and that was so strange to me because I was like, clearly this is an anthropomorphic character,” Mourey says. “It’s a spokescandy.”

Building contractors have also been known to put enormous googly eyes on their excavation equipment, perhaps to make them seem less imposing or destructive to a neighborhood’s sensibilities.

On the opposite end of the anthropomorphism spectrum is a mascot like Mr. Peanut, with arms and legs and a face, but, pointedly, no googly eyes. In fact, he has accessories: A top hat and a monocle. You can admire Mr. Peanut for the character’s design, but it is not “cute” in the same way Loop or even Clippy are cute. “Essentially, he is an anthropomorphic quality of people we don’t tend to like,” Mourey says, “which are snobby, wealthy, uppity types. You can anthropomorphize negative traits as effectively as positive traits.”