Plastic Podcast Episode 17: Plastic Psychology - A Case Study in Indonesia

In this week's episode of the Plastic Podcast, where we dive deep into the interplay between environmental psychology and plastic use, focusing on Indonesia. Join us as we explore the PISCES project with Dr. Anastasia Voronkova from the University of Plymouth. We'll unravel how psychology can help modify behaviors around plastic consumption, delve into Indonesia’s unique challenges with waste banks and religious practices, and discover what the West can learn from the majority world about managing plastic waste. Dr. Voronkova sheds light on how environmental psychology can provide insights into our relationship with plastic, influencing policies and practices to better tackle this pervasive issue.

Episode Guests: Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

More information about Dr. Voronkova here

Follow Dr. Voronkova on X

More information about PISCES

More information about the episode and the Plastic Podcast

Episode Transcript  and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website

Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia

Hosted, produced, and edited by Clark Marchese 

Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong. 

Theme music by Tadeo Cabellos 

Transcript:

[00:00:09.860] - Clark

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Plastic Podcast, the show that tells the science and the story of our relationship with plastic. Today, we're talking about plastic psychology, Indonesia, waste banks, religion, and the factors that influence the choices we make about plastic. Plastic psychology. Well, that's not the most scientific term, but environmental psychology is. This is a growing field of academic study where in lots of questions about plastic might fall. Questions about how we feel about plastic, how we interact with it, what parts of our lives we use it in, and how we consume it. We won't get into answering all of those questions today, but what we are going to do is tackle this topic through another case study, this time in Indonesia. You may have listened to our episode on the global economy of plastic waste, where we learned that the region of Southeast Asia is particularly burdened by plastic. We're not going to be talking about the aspect of global trade so much today. It just so happens that the researcher I found to talk to us about plastic and environmental psychology is part of a large scale international project called, get ready for it, it's quite a long name, the Systems Analytics Approach to Reduce Plastic Waste in Indonesia Societies.

[00:01:30.850] - Clark

But we will call it PISCES because that's its shorter name. And the researcher's name is Dr. Anastasia Voronkova. She has a PhD in Environmental Social Science and is now a researcher at the University of Plymouth working on this project. Dr. Voronkova is going to tell us all about it. We are going to learn how we can use psychology to target people's behaviors around plastic, but we're also going to learn a little bit more about the context of plastic in Indonesia. We'll learn what a waste bank is and how religion and sustainability intersect in the region and what the West can learn for the majority world when it comes to plastic. Without further ado, let's get started. All right. Welcome, Dr. Voronkova. Thanks for coming on the show today. The first question I have is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your research.

[00:02:22.910] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm a researcher working at the University of Plymouth in the School of Psychology, and my My area of research, broadly speaking, is environmental social science, but I tend to focus more on environmental psychology. Right now, I'm looking into how people interact with plastic and with plastic waste, so specifically looking into it in Indonesia, how and why they dispose of it, how they use it, and how and why they purchase plastic items.

[00:02:52.330] - Clark

Okay, great. Now, when we think of environmental researchers, our minds might go to the ocean, maybe climatology biodiversity. But we have this term environmental psychology. For someone who's never heard of it before, can you tell us what that means?

[00:03:08.170] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Yes, certainly. So broadly speaking, environmental psychologists, they can study any type of the environment. So It can be built environment, for example. It can be homes or offices or cities. And they can ask questions like, how do urban environments influence crime, for example, or how does crowding affect people's functioning? But in my case, in the case of what my colleagues and I are looking into, it's more the way that people interact with and relate to the natural environment. That can include a lot of things. It can include finding out why and how people engage in for environmental activism, for example, or we can measure how people feel about different kinds of environmental problems and how it affects their behaviors. For example, how being concerned about climate change affects the way you travel to work, for example. Or it can be very, very specific, something like well-being and mental health benefits people experience from engaging with the ocean and the sea, for example, because there's so many so-called pluma and related benefits. So what is the benefit that people have when they go to the marine environment.

[00:04:17.860] - Clark

Okay, that's fascinating. And I can imagine there's just so many different research questions and angles you could take in that field. I'm wondering, though, can you tell us how we can apply some of those types of research questions to the issue of plastic, specifically?

[00:04:29.470] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

In terms of plastics, there's a lot of ways environmental psychology fits into it. With plastic in general, it's impossible to avoid the human aspect of it because plastic is something we create. If we want to fix it, we need to understand what is it we actually do that causes the problem. If we zoom in on to something as mundane as household waste management, for example, do people buy and recycle plastic? Do people get rid of the waste they create responsibly, do they later or do they always try to find a bin, even if there is none available in their vicinity? If you really want to try and control the spread of plastic, especially the plastic waste, then we need to understand how to capture it, and we need to understand basically all spheres, all the ways people interact with plastic.

[00:05:21.010] - Clark

I can imagine that, and I'm sure we'll talk about this in detail later, but I can imagine that these types of research questions are very important for informing policy decisions and how to understand how people actually operate. But in terms of these questions themselves, you're applying them to a particular case study of plastic waste in Indonesia as part of a project called PISCES. Can you tell me about this project?

[00:05:42.060] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Yeah, sure. So PISCES is A fairly large multidisciplinary research project trying to tackle plastic pollution in Indonesia. I said multidisciplinary because we really have people from all kinds of disciplines and sciences, marine biologists, packaging design researchers, economists. There are genuinely all sorts of disciplines you can imagine involved. It's very international. The overall goal of the project is use all different types of data and create a complete in-depth picture of plastic pollution in Indonesia and suggest various intervention points to try and fix it.

[00:06:22.640] - Clark

Listeners might already be familiar with why Southeast Asia is a hot button region when it comes to plastic waste. But in case someone missed the episode we did on the global economy of plastic waste or is just joining us now, can you tell us a bit about the context of plastic in Indonesia.

[00:06:38.060] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Yes, certainly. It's hard to answer it simply because there is a lot of factors that go into plastic pollution in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, specifically. It's a very diverse and dynamic region. In general, it's a very biodiverse region with a lot of coastline, a lot of islands, a lot of potential and very rapid development. Which also means there is a rapid urbanization going on. It's projected that something like 60, 70% of the population of Indonesia will live in urban areas by 2030. Then there is globalization There's a lot of discussion going on, coupled with rapid economic roles, which means that there is a lot of brands and producers entering the Southeast Asian markets. Then we have the fact that plastic is incredibly useful to Southeast Indonesia, in particular because of its key benefits. Indonesia and Southeast Asia has a very hot climate. There is often, specifically in rural area, lack of access to clean fresh water. Because of the climate, There is a lot of communicable diseases that you need to be aware of, which all means that you want your items, especially your food items, to be protected. So plastic becomes a quick, hygienic and cheap solution for that.

[00:07:57.850] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

And for water as well, a A lot of households won't have a running tap water, let alone drinkable tap water, so they need to have access to clean water somehow. So bottle water comes in to help with that. At the same time, we can't ignore the fact that there is a huge problem of waste export coming from the global north as well, from regions such as EU, from US, from the UK as well. So the US alone, for example, exports hundreds of millions of pounds of plastic waste yearly, and A lot of it ends up in Southeast Asia. This definitely needs to be addressed as well. It's a complex issue.

[00:08:37.460] - Clark

It's starting to become clear why the Paisies project is so interdisciplinary. But your particular angle with environmental psychology is focusing on perception. Can you tell me how people's perceptions of plastic, their attitudes around plastic, or even their culture might affect the situation in Indonesia?

[00:08:54.830] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

There used to be an idea that there is this knowledge definition It's the opposite going on. As long as we tell people what's the right thing to do, they will do it. They just don't know what the right thing is. As long as we tell them that's going to happen, we know it's not true. We know that if that was true, everyone would be eating five portions of fruits and vegetables per day, exercising three times a week, doing 10,000 steps every day. We know it's not true. There's a lot of other factors. One of them, for example, is social norms, both using everyone is doing, what's normal in your society, what you perceive as being normal, what everyone else is doing, and what people want or will judge you for. Those have direct effect on a range of environmental behaviors and on plastic waste management as well. It's often the case that you think that everyone else is littering. Even though you may know, again, that it's problematic, you will end up littering as well because you're saying, Well, there's no other way everyone else is doing it. Generally, changing social norms is It's a pretty reliable approach to changing behaviors.

[00:10:03.700] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

You can see it quite often used in a pro-environmental campaign, things like signs in hotels. Most of our guests use the same towel for three nights or something, or Most of our customers buy loose produce, so it's meant to trigger that feeling that everyone else is doing it, so you should do it as well. Then we know there is an issue of habit. We know that up to 45% of our behaviors are They're taken at roughly the same time, roughly in the same place every day. It's very much embedded into your routine, so it's really hard to break it. In Indonesia, for example, we know that a lot of packaging used to be natural. It was banana leaves, for example. So you use something, you have a snack, and you just throw the banana leaves on the ground, and you know they're going to decompose. It's not the case anymore. All of it is packaged in plastic, but the habit remains amongst a lot of people. There needs to be some a strong disruption or a long motivation to change this habit. And finally, there is an issue of internal and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

[00:11:09.800] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

By extrinsic motivation, I mean things like fines, fees, some financial encouragement to make you do something and to make you stop doing something. And intrinsic value is something that actually appeals to you. Personal values, what you actually believe in, what you actually think is right thing to do. Quite a few campaigns tend to appeal to the intrinsic values. In Indonesia, we find this with informal sector a little bit. There is an informal sector that allows people to sell their recyclable items. You are technically motivated to do it. But this means that the only reason you're doing it is because you're getting some money in return. So this is the reason why we tend to want to appeal to more intrinsic values, to change the intrinsic values when trying to change the behavior.

[00:11:58.000] - Clark

Okay, that makes sense. Because then also some plastics can't even be recycled. So in that case, an intrinsic driver won't solve all the problems at once. I have a couple of follow-up questions. I guess we'll take them one at a time. One thing that you mentioned was habits. Now, Americans, I'm from America, we have our own multitude of wasteful habits that are based off of our systems that allow us to basically forget about plastic waste after we throw it in basically any bin we want. That's the American context. Now, maybe help us to understand more about the Indonesia context. You mentioned the informal sector. Can you tell us a little bit about how the informal sector operates in Indonesia, perhaps in reference to waste pickers and waste banks?

[00:12:39.100] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Yeah, certainly. I actually love this question because it's a very fascinating area, and that's something I think we are quite often a familiar in the global north. Informal sector is directly the consequence of the fact that the formal sector can't keep up, as we discussed, especially in more remote areas in Southeast Asia and in Indonesia. People, sometimes it's individual For people, sometimes it's unofficial enterprises which are involved in recycling and waste management. They are not sponsored or recognized in any way by the formal solid waste authorities. But what they do is that they collect recyclables, recyclable plastic, or sometimes other recyclable items as well from households or from landfills, from beans. It can be small businesses as well. Then they pass them up the chain to some intermediary or a transfer station for processing. Ultimately, the recyclables are supposed to end up these private recycling plants. We know that at least 15 million people in the global south scavenge recyclables from waste for their livelihood. It's estimated that up to 45% of plastic waste in the global south may be getting recycled because of so out of waste that gets recycled, up to 45% of it recycled through this informal sector, which is a huge proportion.

[00:14:00.790] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

But even though it contributes so much, it still remains very much illegal and very much unrecognized. And waste pickers end up being people on the bottom of the pyramid, the ones that are most neglected despite doing so much, most of the work, really, they receive very low pay. They have no labor security guaranteed rights. They have no insurance, no health cover. And at the same time, their job is associated with a lot of dangers, a lot of contamination because obviously, they work with waste. They often work on landfills. There's a lot of movement, thankfully now, towards formalization of this informal waste management sector, which would be a very important step. That's happening in India and Philippines. In some parts of Indonesia as well. So that's waste pickers. In terms of waste banks, that's quite interesting as well. They do a similar thing, but in a very different way. They originated in Thailand, but But they got very strongly adopted in Indonesia. They exchange your recyclable items, especially recyclable plastic items, for money. But it can also be credit. It can be household items, some Waste Banks experiment in a very interesting way. They allow people pay for electricity, for example, or other bills using waste savings, or they allow people to have a food in their coffee again in exchange for plastic.

[00:15:26.520] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

They can get very, very creative. Waste Banks are always free to join. You just need to bring items. They started as a grassroots initiative in Indonesia, but now they are included by the Indonesian Ministry of the Environment as one of the main governmental tools to increase household recycling. The thing with waste banks is, I suppose that they're rarely self-sufficient. They can't give the same prices as waste pickers do, so they're often outpriced by them. They're underfunded, so that's not great. But their role is also community education and engagement. In that, they tend to be quite successful. A lot of waste bank managers are volunteers. They're often women. It creates some community empowerment for women, which is great. They have a lot of variety in how they adapt to local needs as well. Some of them become a learning tool for school children. They conduct events. Some of them become a distribution outlet for handicrafts from local people. They promote the idea as well that plastic When the environment is harmful, they try to increase awareness through the communication with community members and generally promote this idea of togetherness, working together to combat plastic pollution. Their role in the community becomes even more about engagement and all these things apart from just being about waste management.

[00:16:50.290] - Clark

Okay, that's fascinating. Then would you say that this is an area in which there could be a lot of benefit with increased investment?

[00:16:57.770] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Yeah, I think so. I I think it would be great to combine the two, really, because right now, like I said, there is a lot of unfortunate competition between waste banks and waste pickers. They often see each other as, again, competitors rather than people who contribute ultimately to the same cause. So combining, I suppose, formalization of waste pickers with better funding for waste banks could achieve a lot.

[00:17:27.590] - Clark

So we know that there are around 15 million waste Do we have any numbers about waste banks or an idea of how prevalent they are?

[00:17:35.370] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

I know, for example, that they vary greatly across Indonesia. I think in North Sumatra, there's something like 80 waste banks with something like 8,000 customers. So that's quite significant. Or the waste bank in Yogya Kart, which is where it's really originated. It's a very popular... It's in some ways a tourist destination even or a popular community center. So it's a really big Waste Bank. But when you go to somewhere small, a local waste bank is going to be very small.

[00:18:09.240] - Clark

Okay. The other question I had was when you mentioned intrinsic and extrinsic values. Can you tell me how we might go addressing those different values separately when trying to change people's behaviors?

[00:18:20.390] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

That's an interesting question. I feel like everyone is asking that. There's quite a few ways to go around it. It depends on what you value, really. We know that, for example, plastic pollution definitely have a negative impact on the environment. So the natural course of thinking would be that if you value the environment, if you have feeling more connected to the environment, you will tend to exhibit more responsible behaviors towards plastic as well. There were some studies, for example, into specifically, ocean connectedness. So feeling connected to the marine environment, feeling invigorated by it, feeling happy The way around it was associated with, for example, purchasing less single-use plastics. So that's one of the route it could go. Then there is also the route of addressing social norms. Japan, for example, is quite successful in that. There was, again, another interesting study that compared waste management littering in Japan and in Singapore. Both are quite clean communities, but those are achieved through different measures and with different level of success. In Singapore, you get massive fines for littering. I think it's a common knowledge, something like $100 fine for a piece of litter. But at the same time, there don't seem to be a lot of respect for cleaning.

[00:19:49.120] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

If cleaning is not viewed as something honorable or it's a lowly job to do. While in Japan, there is a huge social norm, there's a huge culture of cleaning being viewed as productive, honorable. A lot of people volunteer to clean their neighborhood to participate in cleaning events, again, which are organized locally, which is That's a great way to create this feeling of community or being proud for your community, of wanting it to be clean and creating a social norm that we are people that believe in a clean community and we want to maintain that.

[00:20:29.740] - Clark

Okay, so it seems like research questions asking how to spark intrinsic motivation is a good place to focus. I'm wondering if perhaps religion can be a way to do that. I saw a section in an article that you published about how plastic interacts with religion in Indonesia. Is there anything to you mentioned there?

[00:20:46.390] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Yes, certainly. So there is two things we can talk about here. One is a very interesting thing of how modernity and modern material change traditional practices. For example, we had some data collection done in Bali, and most of Bali is Hinduist, and they have this tradition of Chanang, which is an offering of fresh fruit and flowers with a bit of like, incentive sticks. Obviously, on the surface, this is completely fine. Fresh fruit, fresh flowers, they will just decompose. But Now, they all come packaged in plastic. We have a tradition that's existed for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it was completely fine. But now it became, mass market comes into it. Some companies are trying to get customers, and so they start producing those ready-made offerings. It's still flowers and fruit, but they're all packaged in plastic, and it's done twice a day by a lot and a lot of people. And that produces a huge amount of plastic waste. We We have that, for example, or we have the religious gatherings, for example, for religious celebrations that was described by both our Muslim and Hindu participants. So it really doesn't really depend on religion.

[00:22:12.300] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

You have some gathering, everyone has food, and most of it comes either packaged in plastic or people have a common tradition to use a styrofoam container to then get the leftover. So again, it produces a huge amount of plastic waste. And following on from that, some religious leaders are trying to address it. For example, we had a case of a participant telling us about how their local religious leader, I think it was in a Muslim community, saying that once you've had your religious ceremony, here is your special being. Please be in all your plastic waste there. Make sure to put it there. This is actually in line with our religion. There is actually a huge amount of green, pro-environmental-themed recommendations in Islam and obviously in Hinduism as well. A lot of religious leaders start using that to inspire pro-environmental behaviors in their communities, which is great. We know that religious leaders play a huge role in communities in Indonesia in particular. The fact that they take upon themselves to try and enact this change, it's really great and it's quite effective.

[00:23:30.720] - Clark

Okay, I'm glad I asked the question. And similarly to Waste Banks, although some government funding there could be a good idea, what you just told us is an example that shows that the government is not the only entity that could potentially play a role. Communities are going to be a big part of this as well. I found another section in an article that you published that was titled, What the Western World Can Learn from the Global South When It Comes to Waste Management. So my question for you is, what can we learn?

[00:23:55.790] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Probably a lot. So one thing that I think really sticks out, and I feel like it has been a big topic in our conversation so far as well, is this topic of cross-road movements and local community involvement. There is a lot of self-organization initiative, bottom-up approaches happening in Southeast Asia. We saw it in Indonesia a lot. Starting from waste pickers themselves, they are self-organized, they are self-managed. They have tight links with community members. They get plastic back into the system. Obviously, currently, it's not great because it's not legitimized and not acknowledged. But once it's legitimized, it can become a powerful force for sustainability. Like I said, for example, there is some legislation being put into force in Chile, for example, where wayspeakers are legalized, they're assigned to neighborhoods, they're provided with better vehicles, identity cards, and so on, which massively improves the impact. They're already embedded in the community so That works quite well. Again, is it a solution for everything? No, they would need more funding. But just the aspect of self-organization, this initiative, this willingness to contribute to your community is really something I've rarely seen in the global north in the UK as well.

[00:25:18.580] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

But you see it a lot in Indonesia, people being very passionate about contributing to where they live. As a result, the government often takes attention to this, pays attention to this, and they involve people in this initiatives. There's an example from Tanzania, for example, where they try to improve the waste management system. In addition to actually giving more infrastructure, they tried to create things like world cleanliness competitions, communal cleanups, and things like that, create this ideal of city cleanliness, organize people, and it worked really well. There is actually this idea of Gatun Royong. In Indonesia, that basically means working together. Being a community is quite hard to translate. So this community aspect, uniting people, both social norms in the sense of belonging, coming into it.

[00:26:14.480] - Clark

Those are a lot of really good lessons. The last question I want to ask as we approach the end is, is there anything we missed about any of the topics that we went through today? I know that we covered a lot, but is there anything that we definitely should add before we close out?

[00:26:27.750] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

I suppose maybe the topic of balancing the individual responsibility and corporate responsibility. The thing is, it comes up a lot in talking about environmental psychology. I feel like quite often the impression is that we just put all the pressure on people that we say that all the change will happen to individual action. Individuals are to blame. They're the only ones who can fix it. You don't recycle, so that turtle because of you, which is not entirely true. I think, when working with plastic pollution in the human-facing elements of it. It's important to say that there are different stakeholders, their government, their companies, their individuals, and we all have our own roles. We contribute to plastic pollution in very different amounts. Things like a standard producer responsibility is a crucial thing to achieve, and it's very important. Make sure there are regulations that control plastic production, make sure that waste management system is up to date, and so on. But we still have a role to play. It's definitely not all about the individual, but we still contribute and we can still make changes.

[00:27:45.600] - Clark

I think that is a perfect note to end on and also something to keep in mind as we go forward, a both and type of approach. Well, then my very last question is, where can people find you and follow your work?

[00:27:55.830] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

That's a good question. I have a My researcher profile, certainly. I'll send you a link for that. I am on Twitter, but I've not been active on it as much lately. I'm trying to do better, so watch that space. I'd say that's my into channels for that.

[00:28:17.010] - Clark

All right. I will put links to those in the episode description. With that, I want to say thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for coming on the show and teaching us about this, and also for your important work in this space.

[00:28:27.670] - Dr. Anastasia Voronkova

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:28:38.650] - Clark

You've been listening to Plastic Podcast. You can find more information about this week's guest and links to their work in the episode description. Cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Tadeo Cabindus. I am your host, Clark Morkaisi, and this episode was produced and engineered by me. So if you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. Plastic Podcast is part of a larger network of sciencey podcasts called Pineforest Media. You can find more information about us in the episode description or on our website at pineforestpots. Com. We're also on TikTok and Instagram at Pineforest Media. We've got a lot of exciting science podcasts coming out this year. We just released one about Antarctica. It's called South Pole. You can go check that out. Also a five-star rating across platforms or a review on Apple podcast is one of the best things you can do to help science communication like this reach more people and for the entire network to grow. All right, that's all I have for you today, and we'll talk soon.