View eeRESEARCH collection: Plastics

Have you ever watched a toddler gleefully splash through a sea of plastic bottles? Or witnessed teenagers debating the merits of a Kinder Surprise container? If not, buckle up—because innovative environmental educators are reimagining how we teach about plastic pollution in ways that might surprise you. The six studies in this collection collectively demonstrate that when it comes to teaching about our plastic planet, we might need to throw the traditional playbook out the window (into a proper recycling bin, of course).

Plastic Is Already Part of Kids' Lives—Let's Start There

The standout insight from Kraftl and colleagues' UK-based research is almost painfully obvious once you hear it: children already have complex, embodied, and often contradictory relationships with plastics in their everyday lives. These 11-15 year olds demonstrated sophisticated critical awareness of plastics in consumer culture, yet simultaneously had trouble articulating their relationship with the ubiquitous plastics surrounding them in routine life.

During one fascinating art workshop, a child declared Kinder Surprise containers "useless"—yet in the same breath admitted they were "useful" to him personally for games. This delightful contradiction highlights why starting with knowledge transmission about plastic pollution misses the mark. Kids aren't blank slates; they're already enmeshed in plastic relationships that are emotional, physical, and complex.

Takeaway for educators: Before launching into lessons about ocean gyres, take time to explore students' existing plastic relationships through discussions, art projects, or journaling about everyday plastic encounters.

Creating "Plastic Seas" for Toddlers (Yes, Really)

If you're thinking, "Well, that's interesting for teenagers, but surely toddlers need simpler approaches?"—prepare to have your mind blown by Macalpine and Pacini-Ketchabaw's boldly experimental work in Canada. These researchers intentionally transformed an early childhood classroom into what they called a "queer synthetic curriculum" by literally filling the space with excessive plastic for two years.

Picture this: bottles scattered across floors, hanging from ceilings, stuffed into a crocheted whale stomach. Rather than hiding waste or teaching simple rules, these educators created conditions where 18-24 month-old children had direct, sensorial encounters with plastic's persistence, excess, and unruliness. The children sang with bottles, jumped around them, felt their stickiness, and experienced their unavoidable presence.

While this approach might sound radical, it emerges from a profound insight: traditional "out of sight, out of mind" waste management simply continues our problematic relationship with materials. By making plastic visible and unavoidable, these educators helped even very young children develop responsive relationships with the materials that will inevitably shape their futures.

Takeaway for educators: Consider creating immersive, material-rich experiences that make environmental challenges tangible rather than abstract, even (especially!) for young children.

From Microplastics to Massive Results

Not all effective approaches require turning classrooms into plastic wonderlands. Hogan and Urban-Rich demonstrated the enduring power of well-designed hybrid education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their curriculum for middle schoolers combined traditional lectures with hands-on laboratory experiments and peer collaboration through poster creation.

The results speak for themselves: before the program, most students could only describe microplastics as "small" pieces of plastic, but afterward, 100% could provide a definition, with nearly a quarter correctly identifying the scientific size threshold. Perhaps most impressively, this success came during the challenging conditions of hybrid learning, when many educators were struggling just to maintain basic engagement.

Takeaway for educators: Don't underestimate the power of combining multiple teaching methods—lectures for foundation, hands-on experiments for engagement, and peer collaboration for reinforcement—even in challenging educational settings.

Certifiably Effective: Chile's Green School Approach

If you're wondering whether institutional approaches can move the needle on plastic behaviors, Salazar and colleagues' research from Chile offers compelling evidence. Their study of a national green school certification program with three tiers (basic, intermediate, and excellent) revealed that certification significantly improved children's pro-environmental behaviors—particularly at schools achieving the highest "excellent" level.

Interestingly, children in schools with basic certification often showed better environmental behaviors than those in schools with intermediate certification. This unexpected "reverse effect" suggests that simply moving up certification levels without clear differentiation of benefits might not yield linear improvements. The strongest effects were seen in practices where children had greater decision-making power, like packing lunch with reusable containers—highlighting how environmental education can successfully influence behaviors when children feel empowered.

Takeaway for educators: Structured environmental programs can work, but benefits must be clearly differentiated across achievement levels, and student empowerment is key to translating learning into action.

Seeing the "Cloud" in Your Phone

Perhaps the most conceptually ambitious approach comes from López's work on "ecomedia literacy," which tackles the environmental invisibility of our digital devices. Using the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching method of seeing "clouds in paper" (visualizing how paper connects to broader environmental systems), this framework helps students analyze their personal electronics through four interconnected lenses: cultural, political, material, and experiential.

Undergraduate students researching their beloved Apple products discovered connections to plastic pollution, conflict minerals, exploited labor, and water impacts that had been invisible behind sleek marketing and misleading metaphors like "cloud storage." While students developed systems thinking about their devices, few made explicit water impact connections without specific prompting—showing how even sophisticated frameworks require thoughtful implementation.

Takeaway for educators: Help students unpack the environmental impact of everyday technologies by creating frameworks that connect material realities to cultural narratives and personal experiences.

Going Global: The MOOC That Launched 57,000 Conversations

Finally, Lohr and colleagues remind us that environmental education can scale globally through thoughtful online learning. Their Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Marine Litter reached over 33,000 participants in 92 countries, with remarkable results: 64% reported successful action plans, with 56% still active years later. Participants shared knowledge with an estimated 57,000 others, created networks, established initiatives, and developed educational programs.

The secret to this success? Combining activating learning methods with real-world application opportunities that responded to participants' motivations. By offering content in seven languages and structuring the course in both introductory and advanced tracks, the program created accessible pathways for diverse global participation.

Takeaway for educators: Environmental education can have massive reach when designed with accessibility, action orientation, and real-world applications at its core.

The Future of Plastic Education Is Here (And It's Not Just About the 3Rs)

Collectively, these studies reveal that effective environmental education on plastics requires moving beyond the traditional "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra to create experiences that acknowledge plastics as unavoidable companions in modern life while opening spaces for critical, creative engagement.

Whether you're filling a classroom with plastic bottles, developing certification frameworks, creating global online courses, or simply starting conversations about the plastics already in students' lives, the key is engaging with the material reality of our plastic world rather than treating plastic pollution as a distant problem with simple solutions.

As one researcher aptly noted, there are "no guarantees" in such pedagogical work—but by creating conditions for new plastic relationships to emerge, environmental educators just might help nurture the generation that will finally address our complicated plastic legacy.

What plastic education approaches have worked in your classroom or community? Share your experiences in the comments below!