Thank you for visiting this website. I am Charlotte Verhagen, a Dutch exchange student currently living in Singapore for one semester. Studying neuroscience for nearly 2,5 years now, I am particularly interested in the interplays between human behavior, psychology and the workings of our brains. Additionally, I developed an early interest in the workings of our planet and the resulting different climates and environments. Being raised in an environmental-friendly, vegetarian household, I learned to be conscious about human impact on the environment and the importance of global warming. Geography classes increased my interest in all the aspects of the human-nature relationship. For my high school graduation project, I eventually wrote a paper about ways to motivate people to take climate change seriously.
Living in Singapore, it is very interesting to live in such a different climate, experiencing new weather situations, being surrounded by different natural environments and seeing some animals in their natural habitat for the first time. The course ‘conservation psychology’, for which this website was made, matched with my interests and has me started thinking even more about the ways in which humans interact with their environments.
For this website, I wanted to address one of the environmental problems of the Netherlands. Before coming to Singapore, I stumbled upon a Youtube video, explaining the innovative way in which this city makes trash disappear in one day, in an environmental-friendly way. I was even more amazed when I came here and discovered how little trash you see in public places, although trash bins are actually quite scarce in my opinion. It made me think of my home country, in which people frequently throw trash on the streets and do not seem to care. For this reason, this website shows all the aspects of the plastic waste problem in the Netherlands, the policies and potential solutions and especially, the human dimension and the social science factors affecting the problem.