Onze campagnes en projecten in 2022 - Plastic Soup Foundation

Do you want to know what the Plastic Soup Foundation is doing? What activities we campaign on and what we want to achieve? The battle against plastic pollution is a very long one, but looking back at 2022, we can note a lot of successes.

Plastic Fashion

Plastic Fashion is our campaign to breathe new life into the problem of synthetic clothing fibres.

We published the Do Clothes Make Us Sick? Fashion, Fibres and Human Health report on 1 November.
A survey that we ran showed that 74% of people in the Netherlands are angry about the bad quality of fast fashion clothing.
The campaign got a lot of publicity including news broadcasters such as RTL Nieuws, NOS Radio1, and Radar Online, and from national newspapers.
At the end of November, the D66 political party, with our input, wrote the ‘Initiatiefnota kleding’ (initiative bill on clothing, in Dutch).

Deposit system at stations

We have worked closely with other organisations for years on a deposit system for bottles and cans. And we have been successful! Plastic bottles have had a deposit system since 2021 and cans will follow in April 2023. It is wonderful that NS, the Dutch railway, will install deposit machines at fifty large stations in the Netherlands and has already started in Utrecht and The Hague. And … with one press of the button, users can donate the deposit money to us.

Book launch: This was the Plastic Age

We launched a children’s book called ‘Dit was de plastictijd’ (this was the era of plastic) and a brand new children’s website in October (both in Dutch). The newspaper ‘Het Parool’ called the children’s book ‘the most unexpected title of this year’s Children’s Book Week’ and at the Buchmesse book fair in Frankfurt, there was immediate interest in having the book available in different languages.

World Cleanup Day

We organised the ‘World Cleanup Day’ every year in the Netherlands. We have now handed this baton over to IVN so that we can better focus on the health damage caused by plastic.

In 2021, the Netherlands exported almost 70 million kg of plastic waste to Indonesia. This was revealed in our ‘Een neokoloniaal plasticschandaal’ (a neocolonial plastics scandal, in Dutch) report. The news was explosive. It led to the VVD and GroenLinks political parties asking Parliamentary Questions.
The people who participated in World Cleanup Day collected EUR 10,000 for Nina’s campaign in Indonesia.

Farm Animals

Farm Animals is the name under which the research that we are funding at the Free University of Amsterdam into microplastics in the feed, meat, blood and milk of farm animals is being done.

This news was brought to prominence by all the mainstream media on 8 July 2022. The Party for the Animals political party asked Parliamentary Questions in connection with this research.
More than 1,500 people signed the petition in which we called on the Minister of Agriculture for better controls.

Beat the Microbead

In the Beat the Microbead campaign we urge producers to remove plastics and microplastics from their products and ask consumers to stop using products containing microplastics.

We published a report entitled ‘Plastic: The Hidden Beauty Ingredient’. It showed that 9 of the 10 … It was picked up widely and reports appeared on Dutch news and current affairs programmes such as Nieuwsuur, NOS-Journaal and NOS Stories, in national newspapers such as the AD and the Telegraaf, and international newspapers such as The Times and The Independent.
2,642 people requested their favourite brands of cosmetics to remove all plastics from their products.
More than 50,000 people signed a petition asking the EU to ban microplastics in cosmetics.
At the end of September the European Commission published a proposal to ban microplastics in cosmetics, and in December a motion was passed to push for ambitious legislation in the European context.

SUPPORT OUR FIGHT AGAINST MICROBEADS

Nurdles

Nurdles are tiny plastic granules of which in the EU alone, 23 billion end up in the environment every day. The Plastic Soup Foundation has been fighting this type of plastic pollution for years. Read all about it in the Nurdle dossier

On 3 March 2022 we made the research of a whistle-blower public. It led to the VVD and GroenLinks political parties asking Parliamentary Questions. Two motions were submitted by D66 and the Party of the Animals parties. Both were accepted.

Education

Education has been at the heart of our organisation right from the start. We reach more than 180,000 pupils in the Netherlands and Belgium with our free lesson

Apps

Our two successful apps are Beat the Microbead and My Little Plastic Footprint.

The Beat the Microbead app can be used to scan the ingredients of cosmetics packaging to check if the product contains microplastics.
My Little Plastic Footprint is an app that helps you reduce your plastic consumption by following a plastic diet.

Plastic Health Summit

Our Plastic Health Summit is the congress about the relationship between plastic and health. It is the event where scientists from all over the world gather to present the latest research on this area.

Plastic diet

We try to motivate as many people as we can to choose plastic free through plastic diet activities such as Goede voornemens (good resolutions) and Do the Plastic Switch. We also help companies do a plastic diet.

Campaigns and projects in our fight against the plastic tsunami