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‘Windows of opportunity’: exploring the relationship between social media and plastic policies during the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Researchers analyzed social media activity in the USA, Mexico, and Australia to understand how COVID-19 was used as justification to roll back plastic reduction policies. Their analysis suggests governments exploited the pandemic as a "window of opportunity" to weaken plastic regulations under pressure from industry, not just for public health reasons — a pattern that social media data can reveal in near real-time.
Plastic pollution has reached a crisis point due to ineffective waste management, an over-reliance on single-use plastic items and a lack of suitable plastic alternatives. The COVID-19 Pandemic has seen a dramatic increase in the use of single-use plastics including 'COVID waste' in the form of items specifically intended to help stop the spread of disease. Many governments have utilised COVID-19 as a window of opportunity to reverse, postpone or remove plastic policies off agendas ostensibly in order to 'flatten the curve' of COVID-19 cases. In this paper, we use novel methods of social media analysis relating to three regions (USA, Mexico and Australia) to suggest that health and hygiene were not the only reasons governments utilised this window of opportunity to change plastic policies. Beyond the influence of social media on the plastics agenda, our results highlight the potential of social media as a tool to analyse public reactions to government decisions that can be influenced by industry pressure and a broader political agenda, while not necessarily following responses to consumer behaviour.
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This study examined how the COVID-19 pandemic led governments and industry to deprioritize single-use plastic reduction policies in favor of hygiene and health concerns. Policy analysis showed that the pandemic was used as justification to reverse plastic reduction commitments and increase single-use plastic consumption.
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Researchers analyzed the Break Free From Plastic coalition's brand audit campaigns to examine how activist groups use social media platform logic to generate corporate accountability pressure around plastic pollution, finding that digital toolkits and networked participation have evolved into a sophisticated environmental shaming strategy with mixed corporate response.
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Researchers analyzed geotagged microplastics-related tweets from 2017 to 2022 and found that public attention follows an issue-attention cycle rather than steady growth, with advocacy consistently the dominant theme, declining neutral discourse over time, and significant spatial variation in the United States linked to education, race, and income.
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