DISCOVER
According the report in 2017, 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute, which is equivalent to 20,000 bottles per second.
In addition to water bottles, plastic materials also appear in our daily life such as bags, phone covers, cards, boxes, headphone, shoes, bicycles, plant pots, tables, chairs … to help make our life better and more convenient.
Benefits of plastic products:
. Plastics help building designs more sustainability, long-lasting in use.
. Plastic packaging helps protect and preserve goods while reducing weight in shipping, saving fuel and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
.From computers and mobile phones to televisions and microwaves, durable, lightweight and affordable plastic has helped revolutionize the electronic devices we use every day.
However, after using all the utensils for the main purpose, we often throw those plastic products into the waste sorting and think we have accomplished our task. Wait a second, there may be another long story behind them. According to an estimate, we use about 1.6 million barrels of oil just to produce plastic bottled water every year. Plastic waste is one of many things that takes too long to decompose. Typically, plastic items take up to 1,000 years to decompose in landfills. But plastic bags we use in daily life take 10-20 years to decompose, while plastic bottles take 450 years. There are many ideas that we should reduce the frequency of using plastic and gradually move to life without plastic. Is that really possible?
Plastic products bring many practical benefits to life today, making daily life more convenient. However, after using them, they are very difficult to decompose, how do we reuse them or in other way, extend the using time. For example, plastic bags take 10-20 years to decompose so can we use a plastic bag for 10 years? Why do we only use a plastic bag a few times, about a week and we throw it in the trash. Are we wasting our own profits from plastic and then we have to spend a lot of money, energy and time on handling them effectively?
I made a survey about plastic recycling to gain information about what do people think about recycling.
The survey has 10 questions as
So far I have received 22 responses from those people around me.
Question 1
Question 2
With 90% people absolutely agree to recycle plastics. Still someone does not think like that = 5%
Question 3
Plastics are made from raw materials like natural gas, oil or plants, which are refined into ethane and propane. I think we use plastic products every day but sometimes still don’t know their origin.
Question 4
40% regularly use plastic products and rarely use takes 9%. We can see the plastic products are really a part of our life today, 0% said that they never use plastic. So how can we live without plastic products?
Question 5
40% of people say that they often recycle plastic, compared to 40% of people who regularly use this number is quite positive thing.
Question 6
Everything is made up of many different materials such as plastic, cardboard, paper, aluminum, fabric, … perhaps under the influence and warnings of the media, people who think of recycling will think immediately to plastic recycling.
Question 7
Question 8
I realized most people want to recycle, but they have so many personal reasons make they postpone it. How to help them feel this is a very important thing and fun activity, simple things to do. I really thought about this issue.
Question 9
Question 10
After that, I made an empathy mapping to analyze the data.
After completing the survey with 22 responses, I feel very happy because everyone has enthusiastically made this survey for me. People also ask for their friends to help me get it done faster. I also received a lot of comments on this survey as: simple, easy to do, should add more questions, some people are confused in questions 7 and 8, and many people are interested in plastic recycling . We have shared more ideas about recycling, how to help the environment change better. This was a very good experience for me.
DEFINE
Through the survey I found that everyone is interested in using plastic and plastic recycling. However, there are many reasons given as they want to recycle waste but not enough time, too much work, not convenient, want to do but difficult to practice. So that our recycling waste is based on people’s self-awareness, if they really care about the environment, if they know that these little things they do every day can contribute to a big change in the future. I think they will try to do it no matter how hard or busy.
So our problem today is how to make people more interested in plastic recycling and do it voluntarily and responsibly?
I have some ideas for this:
. Create a campaign to spread the word about plastic recycling: plastic is not just disposable
. Using social platform, creating a trend of taking photos of DIY products from plastic, attaching hashtags like non-disposable plastic, reusing plastic, and plastic for 10 years.
. Create decorative items, artwork from plastic to inspire, add ideas for people to recycle plastic.
. Fundraising from plastic recycling. Create decorative items from plastic, auction and raise money to help wildlife and marine animals.
. Create an app like a tree planting game, every time we reuse plastic, we will take photos, collect points, plant more trees as a forest in the game.
I am a designer, so I think I will start with creating some artwork to inspire people around me. After that, it is possible to create a trend on social networks, take pictures and attach hashtags about plastic recycling. If I could create a trend, be enthusiastically involved by everyone, I could create a fund from plastic recycling products. However, I will start with the idea of creating art products from plastic around my house.
Nita huynh design 