Is Awareness Enough to Tackle Plastic Pollution?

Bridging the gap between increasing waste literacy and taking action.

The weekend has arrived and you’re heading to your local cafe to enjoy a freshly brewed cup of coffee. While looking forward to your morning beverage, are you checking to see if they’ll offer you a returnable mug for take-out or if they’ll accept a travel mug from home? On your way home, you stop in at the grocery store to buy some apples. While there, will you be reaching for a single-use plastic produce bag or placing the apples directly in your cart?

These are a few examples of scenarios we might face in our daily lives where we are presented with an opportunity to choose a behaviour which produces less waste. But what factors guide our decisions, and how can we motivate a shift toward more sustainable behaviours?

The growing convenience of plastic

Since then, global plastic production has climbed from 2 million tonnes of plastic annually to over 450 million tonnes. Nearly half of the items produced are single-use convenience items. While plastic has many beneficial uses (e.g., in vehicles for transportation, safety uses like bicycle helmets), the reality is we are over-producing and over-utilizing this versatile material at unsustainable levels.

A popular strategy to counteract the damage of plastic pollution is by raising awareness. However, there is no one size fits all solution to plastic pollution and increasing awareness alone is not enough to drive sustainable behavioural change. Building new sustainable habits takes time, so how does one bridge the gap between raising awareness and inspiring action?  

Taking a multi-faceted approach: Community-based social marketing

The mechanisms of driving sustainable behavioural change are multifaceted. If we’re better able to understand the behavioural aspects of our relationship to plastic, then we can better identify what opportunities exist to achieve sustainable change.

Community-based social marketing is an approach to environmental behavioural change that extends beyond only raising awareness. In this approach, a specific behaviour is targeted and then the associated barriers and benefits to carrying out this behaviour are identified. When these barriers and motivators are not addressed, it can lead to the “intention-action” gap. This is a disconnect that can happen between having an intention to carry out a behaviour and the motivation to follow through with it. Once these have been identified, a strategy is then piloted and evaluated to inform future plans for large-scale implementation.

Let’s consider a community experiencing low rates of recycling. Municipal staff could determine this is due to missorted waste and target the behaviour of residents sorting the correct items into the correct waste bins. They could use a combination of focus groups, observational data and literature reviews to identify what the barriers are to proper waste sorting behaviour. A barrier could be that waste sorting instructions are too complicated and take too long to read, making it less convenient for residents to sort properly. A focus groups might reveal that visual prompts would help them sort better and a pilot might trial coloured bins which correspond to matching colours in a visual waste sorting guide. The enhanced benefit would be a simplified process that saves time and offers more convenience. The findings of this pilot may be that a colour-coded waste sorting guide leads to a benefit of more recycling, and the next step could be expanding this system to more residents.

Lessons from our own research

The U of T Trash Team’s mission is to increase waste literacy to reduce plastic pollution, which we work towards in all facets of our programming. In this sense, a large part of our mission is around increasing awareness to reduce plastic pollution. While reflecting on the insights of a behaviour-based approach, we wondered whether any of our work is relevant to filling the “intention-action” gap.

Below, we apply that lens to some of our Pollution Prevention Projects – targeted solutions-based research that tackles individual sources of plastic pollution through increasing awareness and piloting solutions.

• Single-use Plastic Produce Bags

Single-use plastic produce bags are a prevalent source of plastic pollution, and there is not yet a wide adoption of bringing your own reusable alternative in local grocery stores in Canada. In 2024, we sought to learn what barriers exist in grocery stores for reducing the use of single-use plastic produce bags. Through observational surveys, we estimated that 2,000 single-use plastic produce bags are used on a daily basis per grocery store in Toronto. We also spoke with grocery store customers and staff to learn their perceptions of this single-use item while discussing potential alternatives to reduce how many are used.

These survey results informed a 2-month pilot carried out in the produce section that introduced different levels of intervention to help us identify what changes would help reduce usage of single-use produce bags. We began by placing large awareness posters highlighting the environmental implications of choosing single-use produce bags that also encouraged shoppers to use a reusable version (or none at all). We then added small versions of these posters near a new display of reusable produce bags that had been placed next to the pre-existing single-use produce bag dispensers. In later stages, we removed the barrier of purchasing reusable produce bags by providing free bags to customers as they shopped.

Awareness posters designed to encourage usage of reusable produce bags
instead of their single-use counterparts.

Early survey results were promising and indicated 94% of customers were open to using reusable produce bags while 72% were willing to purchase them. While this was encouraging, we did not see a large reduction in the use of single-use produce bags during the pilot. This indicates that raising awareness alone is not enough. To shift behaviours away from using single-use produce bags, one might consider interventions like removing the single-use plastic produce bag dispensers. When surveying grocery store owners, we asked if they would consider this option. While their responses indicated they would be ok with the removal of dispensers, they also expressed a potential barrier of suffering a competitive disadvantage if other grocery chains didn’t follow suit. As such, to reduce this barrier further, policies should be enacted to limit the distribution of free single-use plastic produce bags. It would also be worthwhile exploring if stores would consider additional opportunities to increase reusable bag use, such as providing these for a low-cost, offering an incentive, or donating directly to customers.

Offering reusable produce bags to customers for free or at a low cost are potential options to discourage the usage of single-use produce bags.

• Single-use Foodware

Similarly, we explored the use of single-use foodware in restaurants and cafes. This research began with surveys and interviews of business owners to increase awareness about the issue and learn the challenges and opportunities to increase the use of reusable options for customers. Results indicated that foodservice businesses are willing to change their practices but identified that a barrier is needing more support and regulations to implement long-term changes. Support could include guidance on what materials to use and how to run a returnables for takeout program. These preliminary results, along with findings from follow-up phases of this project, inspired a new pilot we supported in Winnipeg to trial reusable and returnable foodware options in local cafes.

Led by the IISD Experimental Lakes Area, they also began with surveys of both restaurants and customers to increase awareness and learn about barriers. Results showed a similar willingness to change, and a similar barrier of requiring more guidance. Customers also shared the barrier of inconvenience to always bring a reusable mug from home. To reduce this barrier, we worked with Muuse to launch a returnables for takeout program in Winnipeg. To test it out, we found a local café, Sam’s Place Coffee, and led a pilot program providing returnable Muuse takeout cups to their customers. Follow-up surveys and data collection suggest that the business owner and customers love the change, and that single-use foodware waste has reduced. Our next step is to try to scale up to more businesses in Winnipeg.

The returnable takeout cup pilot at Sam’s Place in Winnipeg showed promising uptake to inspire more businesses to implement similar initiatives.

How do we create lasting change?

Information on its own can’t be the only path forward to motivate sustainable actions, however the awareness it creates remains a fundamental starting point. For change to happen, and for it to stick, we must continue to share knowledge, but it is equally important to recognize that interventions to reduce plastic pollution are the most effective when traditional awareness methods are integrated with complementary strategies from behavioural and social sciences. One analogy we love is “The Elephant and the Rider” which describes a power imbalance between our rational system in the brain (the rider) and our emotional system (the elephant). It outlines that adopting new behaviours requires giving direction (or knowledge) to the rider, motivating the elephant by tapping into an emotion, and then shape the path for easy progress (i.e., remove any barriers).

By taking an informed and coordinated approach to better understand what the barriers are for a specific behaviour change, we can develop more specific strategies to both reduce these barriers while amplifying the benefits of more desired sustainable behaviours. This approach is exciting and offers new insights and mechanisms that we will learn from to help us achieve our vision of an engaged waste-literate community actively working to protect people, wildlife, and the planet.