Grey Thailand Wins Thailand's First-Ever Green Pencil at The One Show 2026 with Fertilizer 2.5

On May 15, 2026, at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, Grey Thailand wrote a new chapter in Thai advertising history by winning the Green Pencil — the highest sustainability honour at The One Show 2026 — for the very first time in Thailand's history. The award, part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) special category, does not go to the most beautiful or memorable ad. It goes to the campaign that proves the most tangible good.

The campaign that put Thailand on the world stage is called Fertilizer 2.5 — created by Grey Thailand with the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth) and the Department of Agriculture. It did not just raise awareness about PM 2.5. It transformed the very source of the problem into a valuable resource for Thai farmers.

Rice Straw Everyone Burns: The Root of a Crisis That Cities Breathe

Every year after harvest season, the skies above northern Thailand and the central plains turn from clear blue to hazy grey. Millions of rice farmers solve the problem of leftover stubble the only way that is fast and affordable: they burn it.

Nobody wants to. But there is no better alternative. Removing straw by hand is expensive. Leaving it can acidify the soil and interfere with the next planting cycle. Chemical fertilizer is costly enough that many farming families struggle to afford it. The result is a blanket of toxic smoke that covers northern Thailand every dry season — PM 2.5 levels exceed safety thresholds for weeks at a time, and hundreds of thousands of people in Chiang Mai and beyond breathe dangerous air while the cycle repeats, year after year.

Previous awareness campaigns failed at the same point: they told farmers to stop burning without giving them a reason to do anything different. Fertilizer 2.5 began from a different question.

The Solution That Changed the Equation

Instead of producing an ad, Grey Thailand and ThaiHealth produced an innovation. Working with the Department of Agriculture, they developed a specialized microbial starter that causes rice straw to decompose and become high-quality organic fertilizer in just 7 days — many times faster than natural composting and at a fraction of its cost.

The campaign did not say "stop burning." It said: "Your rice straw is worth more than you think."

By reframing stubble as a profitable input rather than a costly waste, Fertilizer 2.5 created a genuine economic incentive for behavioral change. Farmers who joined the program got a product that gave them richer soil and cut their chemical fertilizer costs by 50% — real money for families managing extremely tight agricultural budgets.

The name itself is deliberate: "2.5" is the number every Thai knows from air quality alerts, recast here as the symbol of a solution rather than a threat.

Results Confirmed by Satellite: Numbers That Speak for Themselves

During the pilot period from January to May 2025, the Fertilizer 2.5 campaign delivered measurable results that underpinned its entry to The One Show:

• 96 million square metres of rice fields prepared without burning
• 19.4% reduction in rice-field burning hotspots compared to 2024, confirmed by GISTDA (Thailand's Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency) satellite data
• 21.9% decrease in PM 2.5 levels during the peak burning season
• 50% reduction in chemical fertilizer costs for participating farmers
• 20% increase in crop yields in the following harvest season

In a field where campaigns are typically measured by views, shares, and brand recall, Fertilizer 2.5 was measured by air quality improvements, farmer income gains, and soil health — and it passed.

Thailand's First-Ever Green Pencil

The One Show received entries from 51 countries in 2026. The Green Pencil sits in the SDGs special category, reserved for work that does not merely communicate about sustainability but actively demonstrates it with real-world evidence. Grey Thailand also earned a Merit in the same category.

The achievement carries added weight because the campaign was developed under the creative leadership of Sompat Trisadikun, Grey Thailand's legendary Chief Creative Officer, who passed away in 2025. The Cairns Crocodiles awards that followed were dedicated to him in recognition of his enduring influence on the campaign and the agency.

The campaign's recognition extended beyond The One Show. At Cairns Crocodiles 2026 — Southeast Asia's flagship creative competition — Fertilizer 2.5 was named Southeast Asia Campaign of the Year, with 3 Gold and 2 Silver awards, signalling a broad consensus across the regional industry that this was genuinely exceptional work.

From the Team That Built It

Kanokkorn Seehapan, CEO of Grey Thailand, described the campaign's founding insight: "We understood that solving PM 2.5 crop burning meant addressing the root cause: the livelihood."

The creative team included Jiradej Penglengpol as Executive Creative Director / Deputy Chief Creative Officer, alongside Khamolchanok Masaphan as Senior Copywriter and Smach Chotitat as Senior Art Director — a team that proved that genuine creativity does not end on a screen or a page.

A Signal That Matters Beyond the Award

Fertilizer 2.5 is evidence that the Thai creative industry has capacity that extends far beyond brand promotion. More importantly, it demonstrates that some of the most complex environmental problems do not need new laws or massive budgets — they need a new frame of thinking.

Farmers were not burning rice straw because they did not care about the environment. They burned it because they had no better option. Fertilizer 2.5 created that option, and in doing so transformed the conflict between agriculture and air quality into a partnership where everyone wins.

For city residents who have spent years breathing hazardous air during harvest season, this is possibly the most encouraging signal yet: that the way out of Thailand's PM 2.5 crisis does not have to wait for government action alone. It can begin with understanding how real people actually live — and making it easier for them to do the right thing.

For more on Thailand's environment and innovation, read about dugong and seagrass recovery in Trang and how digital technology is transforming Thai agriculture.