Plastic products, waste, and microplastics have become major issues worldwide, and various countermeasures have been considered. In Japan as well, the "Plastic Management Strategy" was established in May 2019 with milestones including ambitious numerical targets. Here, following the basic principle “3R + Renewable”, various efforts have been started for the prioritized actions. However, consumers might not be fully aware of their use in various products, and their consciousness and behavior are just started to be grasped. Therefore, as a visualization and/or communication tool that enables consumers, companies, governments, etc., we devised "Plide (Plastic Identification) Chart" to share information of consumers’ consciousness and behavior on a wide range of plastic products, and to have dialogues and discussions in the future. For the purpose of verifying the applicability of the chart, necessary data was obtained from the questionnaire survey and plotted. A hierarchical cluster analysis was performed on a chart consisting of two axes, "necessary / un necessary" and "avoidable / unavoidable", based on the results of the consumer questionnaire survey. And plastic products were classified into six groups. We were able to understand the consciousness and tendency of consumers, and obtained findings that contributed to the examination of short-term countermeasures.

Universities are expected to play a role to contribute to realization of the material-cycle and decarbonized society through their advanced activities, as well as to fulfill their responsibility as waste generators. In this study, we conducted a composition survey of waste plastics discharged from the Hongo Campus of the University of Tokyo, and discussed challenges towards advancing the cyclical use of waste plastics. We found that general plastic waste collected from the liberal arts departments include more alien substances in comparison with general plastic waste collected from the science and engineering departments. In addition, a significant amount of plastics is contained in combustible waste in the liberal arts departments. These results indicate the need for enhancing awareness of the members for waste separation and recycling. On the other hand, polyolefinic plastics accounted for a large fraction of waste plastics discharged from laboratories, which indicated the possibility of efficient cyclical use of the laboratory plastic waste by excluding rubber gloves and ensuring the complete removal of adhering substances from the plastic waste category.