Introduction

You and I live in an era that we can easily call the “Plastic Age”. We are all heavily depending on this material and it is a myth to think we can easily live without it. A few decades ago, many of us only saw the bright side of our plastic world. Now, there is increasing awareness of the disadvantages of plastic. It is polluting local environments and drifting in our oceans, making the war against plastic a major global challenge.

How do we fight this war? Technical approaches, like improving recycling procedures or producing alternative packaging materials, can restrain the plastic waste problem but are not able to solve the problem completely. They require people’s acceptance and active cooperation to work effectively. The plastic waste problem needs to be tackled from a multidisciplinary approach, also taking the social and psychological dimensions into account.

While the plastic waste problem is a global issue, this website will mainly focus on the situation in the Netherlands. You can learn about the impact of the problem, the implemented policies and interventions and the response of the public (the social perspective). The psychological perspective focuses on the general psychological factors that can explain people’s attitudes and behaviors regarding the plastic waste problem. Understanding these factors is a prerequisite for being able to motivate people and induce behavioral change. This has been proven to be difficult, especially for conservation issues. Taking all of this into account, the ‘towards the truce’ section will elaborate on some steps that can be taken towards solving the problem. These ”solutions” can’t solve anything on their own and require industries, policymakers, companies and consumers to all take their responsibility.