The Plastic Problem
The overuse of plastic bags in North America and around the world is causing an environmental disaster with our ecosystem. Plastic is non-biodegradable which means that it does not break down in our environment and instead, it is filling up our natural resources, and most is becoming most evident in our oceans. According to a news story from globalnews.ca, 8-million tons of plastic finds its way into our oceans annually. Now initially this raises concerns for all marine mammals, birds and fish but the problem actually goes much deeper than just these creatures. What happens to the plastic once it enters the ocean, because of the ocean’s currents, is it gets swept into a gyre where the plastic swirls and begins to break down into tiny particulate. The North Pacific Garbage Patch has 80,000 tons of swirling plastic and is three times the size of France. These minute particles of plastic are mistaken for food and are clogging the digestive system of our marine wildlife. When humans consume these fish and birds, we are ingesting the same toxins, making plastic part of our food chain. Studies are only now being done to determine the health impacts that nano-plastics have on the human body. But, if it is toxic to fish and birds and known to pass on carcinogens to humans through fish, we can be fairly safe in assuming that it will not be a favourable outcome for the human race in the long run.
Where Are We Now?
Plastic is pervasive in today’s society around the world. Look around at your surroundings, most of what we have in our homes are made of some form of plastic including things like; the material covering our couch, to the plastic parts that make up our fridge, stove, and other appliances, to our toothpaste and dental floss containers. Even the paint on our walls, if it is latex, has plastic in it. In spite of all of this, two of the biggest contributors to this plastic epidemic are plastic bags and plastic water bottles. According to applied social psychology if we designed an intervention intending to address people’s behaviour that is incongruent with their values then we might be able to make some headway with this plethora of plastic. Humans by their nature will follow the path of convenience unless they are given a reason not to. Because plastic bags are easy, convenient, and readily available because they are one of the biggest culprits contaminating our oceans and because they are typically the fastest to break down, let’s start there. So, the question is, how do we curtail, or better yet eliminate the use of disposable plastic bags. Everything from the small plastic produces bags to the larger grocery size bags.
What Can Be Done?
It would be interesting to conduct a study that helps us understand plastic use. After selecting a community of people in which to launch an intervention, the first objective will be to determine people’s habits around single-use disposable plastic bag by conducting a survey. Do they consider themselves to be environmentally friendly? Once you have determined their values and household usage of plastic bags, it will be an opportunity to provide some educational materials about the impact of plastic bags and the bigger impacts beyond what we see in our day to day lives.
This project would allow the research team to establish some antecedent measures by educating the participants and priming the participants’ desire to participate. The information would paint the picture of marine life dying, to the cancer-causing toxins fish ingest, and by default we ingest, and the plastic particulate matter being present in our drinking water sources today. The next step would be to provide consumers with the tools to have a positive impact on the environment by participating in a study whereby they are provided 12 reusable mesh produce bags and 6 reusable grocery shopping bags. Their participation would require the completion of a weekly telephone survey to determine the impact of their having the tools to reduce the soft plastic use in their household. Each week for four weeks during the study we would contact the household to ascertain how many plastic bags and of what size they acquired over the course of the week. Once the results are tallied across the community for plastic bag acquisition, this information would be shared with all participants letting them know how they faired in relation to others in the community.
This engagement with individual feedback and group feedback conditioning will provide an opportunity for self -awareness and thus a reduction in plastic bag use. The study would appeal to the consumers sense of cognitive dissonance, of recognizing that if they use plastic bags, they are behaving incongruently with their overall desire to help protect the environment. Additionally, by recognizing the contribution others have made in not using plastic grocery and produce bags according to Schultz’s strategy of activating norms, people would be more motivated to comply with what others are doing. The tally of results gleaned from the weekly interviews would provide the study participants with the measurable results that would motivate engagement and encourage the participants to continue to choose to have a positive impact on the environment.
Conclusions and Outcomes
This type of four-week study could provide and opportunity to acquire enough concrete feedback to determine if this type of intervention could have an impact. If the results are positive, and likely they would be based on the activating norms theory, then it would be an opportunity to put together a community project that could affect communities across the globe. After all, if we don’t start paying attention, it is likely that we, the human race will face compromised health, depleted fish supplies and an environmental impact that will affect our children’s, children’s, children.
References
Campanella, E. (2018, June 17). Plastic pollution crisis: How waste ends up in our oceans. Retrieved February 03, 2019, from https://globalnews.ca/news/4269163/plastic-pollution-waste-ocean/
Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems(Second ed.). Los Angeles: Sage.
Tyree, C., & Morrison, D. (2017, September 05). Invisibles. Retrieved February 03, 2019, from https://orbmedia.org/stories/Invisibles_plastics/multimedia