Cucumbers, peppers, lettuce… many vegetables appear in our supermarkets covered in plastic. Single-use plastic generates a huge amount of plastic waste. But how can we address this issue as consumers?
Yue Dou, an assistant professor from the NRS Department of the ITC Faculty (University of Twente) is developing a project with Meike Morren from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as part of a novel funding scheme collaboration between the two universities to involve consumers and supply chains in reducing single-use plastics.
There are two main reasons why Yue decided to investigate single-use plastics: “The first is the academic reason. I have always studied agent-based models in food systems. The end consumer and supply chains are both part of the food system. I noticed there is a lot of research on consumer behaviour to be more sustainable and, at the same time, there is research on spatial analysis of store locations, but there are not many linkages between these two fields as a clear gap. I thought that addressing this gap was important” explains Yue. But besides that, there is a personal motivation behind this project “When I go to some supermarkets, I can never find a cucumber without plastic wrap. That triggered me to investigate the location of stores near me where I could buy vegetables or fruits without plastic, but I couldn’t find any information” states Yue.
A score for sustainability
As a collaboration between the University of Twente (UT) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), this project is being developed parallelly in the Coop supermarket at the UT campus in Enschede and in the Spar at the VU campus in Amsterdam. The first step consists in substituting plastic bags with paper bags and assessing the opinion of consumers.
The second step is running a residence-level survey in Enschede and Amsterdam, consulting behaviours and beliefs in terms of plastic use and food waste it costs at the household or individual level. The third step is assigning a sustainability score to every supermarket in Enschede and Amsterdam. The key to this project is to “overlay the demand layer of the households with the sustainability scores of the stores” according to Yue. “With this data, we are building our database to generate a map with all the stores and their sustainability score. This will help consumers select their preferred supermarket based on plastic usage”.
Some challenges come with this project as indicated by Meike, the counterpart of Yue in VU; On the one hand, consumers appreciate the shift from plastic to paper in supermarkets and consider paper bags more environmentally friendly. On the other hand, paper bags cannot be re-used need resources to be created and can become polluted, which makes the unsuitable for recycling. Taking also into account the food waste that increases with less plastic packaging, Meike argues that a shift from plastic to paper might be seen as environmentally friendly by consumers but in fact increases the emissions generated by food. There is also a difference in the research paradigm of behavioural sciences and spatial analysis “In behaviorial science they often run experiments in sequence to analyze the actual behavioral change. We focus more on the quantitative analysis of existing spatial patterns” explains Yue. There is a lot of potential in this multidisciplinary field because there is still little literature on the topic.
Thinking “out of the box”
This project will not only help consumers to change behaviours but also further stimulate the current initiatives by supermarket chains to reduce plastic usage in the entire chain (Plastic Pact NL). The calculated sustainability score highlights the extent to which consumers are confronted with plastic across different supermarkets. Within other European countries, there are other regulations to achieve this. “In Carrefour, the major supermarket chain in France, fruits and vegetables are sold in bulk” with this, Yue means shipped and sold in large boxes instead of individually wrapped in plastic. Bulk sale usually costs less and requires less packaging. In the Netherlands, there is no such regulation, but Yue hopes to scale up the project to a national level.
More information about this project
Yue Dou is developing this project in collaboration with Meike Morren from the Vrije University of Amsterdam, Javier Martínez, associate professor from the PGM Department of the ITC Faculty and Hendra Susanto, MSc student supervised by Javier Martínez and our NRS colleague, Yue Dou. The societal partners of the project include GreenHub office from the University of Twente, Coop and Spar.
Please contact Yue Dou for more information about this project.
