We Found @YourPlasticHere: Publishing #SingleUsePlastic data on Twitter
How we’re channelling data through social media to hold FMCG producers to global best practice
Context
In earlier articles we talked about how our Wastebase system collects data about discarded single-use plastic packaging, with a focus on bottles.
Wastebase has now collected over 180,000 data points about FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) post-consumer waste packaging. We’ve linked these data points to over 500 distinct brands. These brands are linked to over 300 producers (the corporations which are the ultimate beneficial owners of the brands).
We’ve seen several key themes emerge from our data:
#1 Most single use plastic bottles are made for drinks products
Beverage bottles (soda or drinking water) constitute over 80% of the detected packages in every one of the nine countries we have data from.
#2 Only a few producers need to change behaviour to make a big difference
A relatively small number of producers are responsible for most of the waste — only five companies are responsible for over 40% of the plastic waste in each country. This share rises to above 80% in some countries.
#3 Top polluters are a mixture of domestic and global firms
The global firms most prevalent are:
- Beverages: The Coca-Cola Company (US), Pepsico (US) and Monster Beverage Corporation (US)
- Food: Danone S.A. (France) and Nestle, S.A. (Switzerland)
- Other products: Unilever Plc (UK) and Beiersdorf AG (Germany)
Informing consumers about who owns their plastic
Part of our mission is to provide good quality data to everyone involved in the plastic value chain. This data can inform better decisions about how everyone can contribute to a circular lifecycle for plastic.
That’s why we’ve launched our new automated tracker to show producers where their waste really ends up.
Many of the world’s biggest producers showcase ‘green’ initiatives in countries where consumers and governments have the agency to demand it. However, the same approaches are not always applied in every country where those producers operate. We think that plastic producers should apply the ‘highest common denominator’ of practice. In other words, they should make a commitment to applying the same standards in every country where their products are sold, not just in those where consumers have the most financial power.
With our new feature, we aim to make consumers and concerned citizens everywhere aware of which producers own the brands they like, and how (if at all) those producers apply circular approaches in the other countries where they operate.
Supporting consumers to demand change
We hope that this feature will help people engage with brands. We want consumers to encourage brands to apply their best practices in every country, in terms of:
- reuse/refill (embedding design features that allow product packages, such as bottles, to be reused or refilled by consumers or via retailers)
- recyclability (for example, by reducing use of coloured plastic which is harder for consumers to recycle) and
- taking responsibility for ensuring that post-consumer packages are not dumped in the environment (a practice that affects many developing countries)
In other words, applying a ‘highest common denominator’ globally.
An example from a beverage producer
The Coca-Cola Company recently announced that in the UK, all plastic bottles of sizes 500 ml or smaller will be made of 100% recycled plastic, from September 2021 onwards.
However in every one of the seven African countries where Wastebase collects data, the soda bottles it distributes contain 0% recycled plastic.
An example from a household product producer
Unilever states on its own website that recycled content differs between markets:
“For instance, in 2021 Hellmann’s launched 100% recycled packaging in two-thirds of its markets, Knorr launched 100% recycled plastic bouillon tubs and lids in Europe, and Swedish Glace’s plant-based ice cream comes in recycled plastic tubs. Our Dove beauty brand uses 100% recycled plastic bottles in Europe and North America (where technically feasible) and 98% of its new refillable deodorant packaging in the US is made from recycled plastic.”
In sub-Saharan Africa, the Unilever bottles detected by Wastebase contain 0% recycled plastic.
How our new feature works
Wastebase already lets…
- Data Collectors add new products to the database when they detect a discarded item in the environment
- Data Validators link these products to their respective brand and producer based on label, producer’s website, and other public information sources.
Now, users can research social media handles for brand and producer, then record them in the database.
@YourPlasticHere will automatically tweet a scan:
- every 100 scans (roughly)
- anywhere in the world
- by any user
Here’s a real example:
Each tweet will:
- mention the producer’s Twitter handle
- state the total number of that product found anywhere in the world
- share the total number of that product found in the country of scan
- share a link to the data
Followers can then like, quote or RT to directly engage with producers.
Following the link to detailed data you can see this:
Want to ask producers to do more to reduce plastic waste?
If you’re on Twitter, follow @YourPlasticHere. Share our tweets to help us amplify the impact of our data.
If you have a bit more time, visit plastictracking.app on your phone and collect data about five plastic bottles you are about to put in the bin — or which you find discarded in your area.
Complete our micro-survey: tell us what features you’d like to see next
Appendix: technical bits
You can read this other Medium article to get an idea of our overall tech stack.
For the Twitter integration, key points to note are:
Integration SDK
We decided not to use the official Twitter Javascript SDK — its still in Beta, but more importantly we found it to be a lot more work for common use cases. Rather we used https://www.npmjs.com/package/twitter-api-v2 which is light, small, and well-documented.
Twitter Development Account
Twitter is revamping its offer for developers. We found it easy to sign up, however the process to apply for an “Elevated” account (needed so that we could post tweets, see below) was a little more involved as we were asked essentially the same questions, multiple times with slightly different wording, at multiple stages of the process. On the other hand the turnaround time for each stage was pretty fast, so the whole process took about a week.
A larger challenge was (and still is) that Twitter doesn’t have the concept of separate environments — so if you want to run automated tests that post tweets — either you need to post them to your live handle (and delete them immediately afterward) — or create an entirely separate account (for which you will also need to request Elevated permissions) and run your tests against that. Neither approach is ideal.
Twitter Authentication
For posting Tweets (as opposed to just reading Tweets and their metadata), your app will need to use OAuth 1.0a authentication — which in turn means you need to request an Elevated developer account. Altogether this requires your app to present two token+secret pairs to the Twitter API — we stored the secrets in AWS Secrets Manager to avoid them ever being present in source control or on a filesystem.
Asynchronous Invocation
The process of collating the data for a tweet and posting it is relatively expensive, computationally (which, on a serverless platform, means it is also more expensive in energy terms). This meant that we didn’t want to process it in the main execution thread for users submitting scans. As we use the AWS Lambda serverless platform (which means no long-running daemon threads), we made our “scan submission” Lambda function asynchronously invoke a second “tweet processing” Lambda function to handle the tweet processing. This allowed the “scan submission” Lambda to return an HTTP Response promptly to the user’s app, while letting the “tweet processing” Lambda take as long as required.
