The overconsumption of one single-use plastics… what for?
… Join the new MOOD and Let’s RE-USE!
Contrary to what most people might think, the increase of population doesn’t have to do with the increase of plastics, actually, it’s not because we have more population that the quantity of plastic will increase, it’s because of the overconsumption of the population.
The biggest and most famous companies provide cheap plastic that undermines various other interventions or activities and they do not take it in charge. They do not incentivize the replacement of single-use plastics and packaging in favor of reusable alternatives or alternative delivery systems. Public politics by their hand, do not promote secondary markets or recycling either, so : how to raise consumers awareness about plastic in order to put pressure on industry because consumers will not want to buy from them?
Consumer participation is required
So this shift policy can be successful. So that system designers can make convenient design collections that can be easily reused. When we talk about examples, those are some solutions:
– Improve the understanding that useful life of products and packaging, can be maximized through design that prioritizes reuse, repair, and durability, incentivizing the circular economy.
– Have a product design to encourage the producer or manufacturer to use only one or two types of materials as maximum, in order to resolve the sorting and collection problem and incentives the recycling.
– Encourage deposit refund systems available for consumers like pop bottles with a deposit on that gave a little bit of pocket money extra if you took the bottle back, and that sits under the EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) schemes.
– internalize the cost of waste management into product prices so people can be informed about the true price of a single use product, so they start to get use to give them a second use.
https://www.tomra.com/en/discover/circular-economy/feature-articles/what-is-extended-producer-responsibility
https://asef.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Background-on-paper-on-SUP_ENVforum.pdf
