Uses vs. Refuses:

Multiple week-long plastic reduction challenges are often conducted on campus to generate data on use and refusal of single-use plastics by the community. These results are useful for identifying where the Eckerd community is struggling or excelling when it comes to single-use plastic reduction, and helped target our education and policy efforts. The experience when hosting these challenges help foster a sense of accountability in our participants regarding their individual consumption.

Unlike many plastic reduction challenges, where participants need only to “pledge” their goal to reduce single-use plastic consumption for a given amount of time; our challenges required participants to log the number of plastic items used and refused. The added layer of accountability shifted the balance from passive acceptance to active refusal of single-use plastics, and facilitated on-going engagement.

The data above shows the average item use and refusal per person during the three challenges conducted over the 2018-2020 academic year. Most categories had a higher refusal than usage rate, however, single-use food containers and single-use snack wrappers had a higher usage rate. More challenges will be conducted over the next academic year, and our goal is to see the number of refusals increase and the number of uses decrease.