Team:SIS Korea/SurveyAnalysis
Survey Analysis
Sticker Poster
Question: How much plastic do you think each individual consumes each year?
The purpose of creating the sticker poster was to see the guesses and knowledge of people about how much plastic do you think each individual consumes every year. Under the question: How much plastic do you think each individual consumes each year?, we left four choices for students to answer from: 57 kg, 76 kg, 98 kg, and 114 kg. After a week into the campaign, we collected and summed up the tallies in each of the numbers; the results ended up as 53 tallies for 57 kg, 13 tallies for 76 kg, 57 tallies for 98 kg, and 62 tallies for 114 kg. Based on the results, it seemed that not many people thought that 76 kg of plastic was the correct answer, with most people thinking that each individual consumed 114 kg of plastic every year. However, in observing the students’ reactions to the poster and discussing their choices with them, we realized that no one had an accurate understanding of plastic usage. Most students were simply guessing out of the four choices with no real knowledge to base their answers off of.
Online Survey
*all of these questions were asked to 169 Korean elementary, middle school, and high school students via a google form
Due to the nature of a survey to be relatively self-biased, we decided to use the survey as a way of evaluating the perception of plastic use rather than the reality of plastic use in Korea.
The following two questions were asked to survey the perception of plastic use. As we can see, the biggest portion of responders (49.7%) responded that they believe they used 0~1 plastic bottles/cups per day. When we compare this statistic with the official statistic of yearly plastic cup use in Korea is 70 million cups a day, we can conclude that people are underestimating their daily use of plastic, resulting in a false sense of relief. This conclusion is further strengthened by the second graph that shows that the biggest portion of responders (40.7%) admitted that they didn’t carry reusable water bottles at all in a week.
The following two questions were asked to measure the public’s reaction to two policies recently invoked by specific brands and the Korean government. The first graph shows the public’s reaction to the policy that replaced the commonly used disposable plastic straws with paper straws. As seen from the graph, a little over the majority of the responders (55.2%) felt this policy to be effective in lowering plastic usage. Such percentage poses some worries as it may be implying that the majority of the public are overestimating that the implications of the ban on plastic straws while in reality, only 1% of the total plastic waste is comprised of plastic straws. This may give the public and companies the false sense of “moral license,” leading to an underestimation of the plastic epidemic.
A similar trend can be found in the second graph that surveyed the public’s approval on the Korean policy to ban the use of disposable cups indoors in lowering plastic usage. Here, only 52.5% of the public were approving of the effectiveness of the policy. This lowered approval rate may be attributed to the newly founded but common problem of people ordering their drinks for indoors, not finishing the drink, and asking for a takeout cup for when they leave. Also, there has been the act of replacing plastic cups with paper cups, which has led to the overconsumption of paper cups. However, paper cups aren’t the solution to this problem as the majority of paper cups are landfilled due to their waterproof lining on the insides of the cup. Thus, the same worry persists as more people believe these policies are working, the less creative and less actively will the government invoke more effective policies.
The plastic epidemic we tried to combat is a well-known and prominent issue - the problem lies in the fact that people have become indifferent to it after years of over-exposure to the issue. As such, the first priority of our human practices was to wake people up again to a state of awareness of the issue in which they would become more aware and attentive to the plastic epidemic that we sought to solve.
The second priority is that our project had to show a significant improvement compared to the previous efforts that had been made to combat the plastic issue, in order to appeal and act as an effective solution. As such, it was important for us to gain advice from others about how to ensure the maximum efficiency of our product.
Survey
During our campaign, our team also created an extensive survey in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of people’s awareness and perception of the issue of plastic waste. The 168 people that responded encompassed various ages and backgrounds, including multiple acquaintances around us and the middle school students that we worked with.
From this survey, we were able to find that most respondents viewed the issue of plastic waste as a very serious problem. When asked how urgent addressing the plastic waste in the ocean is on a scale of 1 to 5, 94.6% answered that this corresponded to 4 or above. In addition, the majority of respondents answered that they would be willing to replace plastic products in their lives with sustainable options; for instance, 55% responded that they would be willing to pay an additional price for reusable cups or bags, and 53% were willing to use metal straws instead of plastic straws.
However, despite the general agreement on the urgency of this issue, most respondents were largely uninformed about the specific circumstances. While the majority of respondents responded that they did not know the difference of microplastics and plastics, most respondents that chose to elaborate provided a range of vague, inaccurate assumptions, such as that microplastics will naturally dissolve in water, or that they are produced by burning plastic materials. Furthermore, many respondents were exacerbating this problem with destructive habits in their daily lives, with 90% answering that they used at least one plastic cup per day.
There were also mixed opinions about existing policies in Korea designed to curb plastic usage. On a scale of 1 to 10, only 53% rated current efforts to replace plastic straws with paper over 5; only 50% said the same about Korea’s law banning the usage of disposable cups indoors.
The survey provided us with valuable insight regarding people’s level of awareness regarding this issue and the extent to which they were willing to inconvenience themselves for the sake of the environment. This also allowed us to shift the focus of our campaign and education efforts to address specific aspects that many were unaware of, such as the distinction between plastic and microplastic, and how plastic is actually recycled.