Awareness of plastic pollution and adoption of green consumer lifestyles among students from high school

Green consumerism is a powerful tool that has the ability to be implemented to reduce plastic pollution. With the ever-increasing issue of plastic pollution, an uptake in green consumer lifestyles is as important as ever. This problem led us to research the question, “how will an increased awareness of worldwide plastic pollution lead to green consumer lifestyles among students who attend High School X?”. With this question, we hypothesized that an increased awareness of plastic pollution will lead to an increased uptake of green consumer habits and lifestyles. We used an experimental method with a pre-test post-test design to test our overarching hypothesis. Participants had to complete two questionnaires a week apart from each other. In addition, participants in the experimental group read and watched material about plastic pollution every day throughout the course of the week. After collecting our data, we assessed whether knowledge about plastic pollution and pro-ecological worldviews were changed significantly according to the New Ecological Paradigm Scale. There was a statistically significant increase in awareness and pro-ecological world views in the experimental group supporting our hypothesis. From our results, we were able to conclude that the material given to the experimental group was successful in increasing individual knowledge regarding plastic pollution as well as increasing individual pro-ecological world views. This increase in knowledge is also expected to increase the uptake of green consumer habits among our participants, therefore accomplishing the goal of our study.