In 2011 in suburban Perth, Australia, Rebecca Prince-Ruiz visited her local materials recovery facility as part of her job with a local government. Here, she saw all the recycling from the area sorted and sent on to be processed — mounds of plastic that helped her visualize our throw-away society. In the previous year, 2010, more than six billion tonnes of plastic had been created worldwide and just 16 percent of that had been recycled. Those numbers suddenly felt very real for Prince-Ruiz, who felt overwhelmed by the issues of consumption and waste. “We can’t recycle our way out of it,” she says.

Following that visit, Prince-Ruiz made a personal resolution to try to avoid using single-use plastics. She started by vowing off plastics for a month, convincing some of her friends and colleagues to join her. The next year, she and her friends made a Facebook page as a place to share experiences and advice about reducing their reliance on plastic. The premise was simple: “It’s just about rethinking our consumption and trying to use less of the single-use disposable stuff that we are increasingly using for a few minutes and throwing away,” Prince-Ruiz says.

She never could’ve imagined that in the coming years her month-long challenge would go on to have a global following and be taken up by so many people around the world. Today, Plastic Free July involves millions of active participants around the world. Individuals can take up the challenge in a number of different ways, including on a personal level in their home or in their workplace as an employee or employer. Businesses, community groups, councils or municipalities, and schools are all able to participate in Plastic Free July.

Those who sign up on the official website pledge to either avoid single-use plastic packaging, eliminating the “top four” items, which are plastic bags, bottles, straws, and coffee cups, or go completely plastic free. Plastic Free July provides support and advice through emails, social media, and its website along the way.

The goal is for people to give some thought to their reliance on single-use plastics. Most participants commit for the month when signing up online, though some people can choose to give it a go for just a day or a week. Others attempt to make the pledge permanently.

“Everyone can do something, and I think that’s what’s the appeal of Plastic Free July,” says Prince-Ruiz. “It’s not that you have to do everything, just try something, try for a day, try for a week, try for July.”

Social media has played a significant role in the movement’s growth. Soon after creating the Facebook page, Prince-Ruiz started sharing tips that seemed to resonate with the page’s followers. For example, when someone on the page mentioned trash liners, Prince-Ruiz shared photos of her bin, where she had replaced her plastic trash bags with a recycled newspaper. “I just remember within a couple of hours 3,000 people had seen that photo and people were commenting from all over world,” Prince-Ruiz says.

Each year, more and more people started sharing their tips and examples. The pace of the movement’s growth often occurred faster than Prince-Ruiz could keep up with, providing her with several pinch-yourself moments. One such moment involved musician Jack Johnson, who tagged Plastic Free July in a social media post about the steps he was taking to encourage the music industry to reduce plastic waste at festivals, alongside a photo of himself holding a stainless steal pint cup at a recent concert. Johnson is now an official ambassador of the movement. In 2019 Prince-Ruiz was notified via a Google alert that New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo had proclaimed July as “Plastic Free Month.” This commitment has been taken up again in 2021, with the New York State Senate’s commending the movement and encouraging New Yorkers to participate in the challenge. It has also had an impact on legislation, with an announcement this year that the state will follow California’s example by banning single-use toiletry bottles in large hotels.

In 2017, Prince-Ruiz established the Plastic Free Foundation and moved on from her local government job. She started working with behavioral scientists and communications experts, and formed a team to help spread the impact of Plastic Free July beyond individual households to schools and companies. Last year, an estimated 326 million people from 177 countries took part in the challenge.

“When you start with your hands doing something practically…it starts to make changes that we feel good about, we want to share, we want to take it further,” says Prince-Ruiz. Plastic Free July Foundation figures show 85 per cent of people who take part in the challenge go on to make changes that become long term habits, such as switching to reusable containers and bringing their own bags to grocery stores. On average each participant reduces their household waste and recycling by about 21 kilograms per year.

“You read and watch these founders stories and hear the story of, I wanted to start a movement, I wanted to change the world,” says Prince-Ruiz. “But this is really the story of just, I want to change what’s in my bin. I’m not pretending that I think we’re going to solve the plastic pollution crisis by using a reusable water bottle, but behavior change, and lots of people making those small changes of 5 percent, that’s the heart and the start of changing our culture.”

Last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world and continued to disrupt everyday lives, Prince-Ruiz considered canceling the official July event. “This time last year, we were saying, Should we even do a plastic free July, is that being tone deaf?” she says.

She consulted with experts to decide how to proceed. For instance, she asked Marylouis McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales, about the safe use of reusables. McLaws responded that reducing plastic waste was as important then as ever. “[McLaws] stressed that it’s not either/or. It’s not caring for human health of caring for our planet,” Prince-Ruiz says. “She said we have and we must do both at the same time.”

So Prince-Ruiz decided to continue with Plastic Free July 2020. “At that time, so much was out of people’s control, there was so much we couldn’t do, and the challenge actually gave people an opportunity they could control something during a month of their lives,” Prince Ruiz says. “We couldn’t control not being able to travel and see our friends and family, but we could control what we’re doing in our homes and our kitchens up to some extent.”

Prince-Ruiz admits the pandemic has increased the use of some single-use plastics. Many cafes around the world began refusing customer’s reusable coffee cups once Covid-19 outbreaks hit locally. From a medical perspective, it’s been reported that in the first few months of the outbreak in China, medical waste like gloves and masks increased six fold. But Prince-Ruiz has encouraged many people to harness some of the past year’s environmental opportunities. “Yes, we’ve seen an increase in the rise of plastic because we’ve been using it in our healthcare and medical systems, and I think there’s a role for this material. That’s one of the important uses of it,” she says. “But also think about how many cities have had empty office buildings for a year now, people have been at home a lot, what did the shops run out of in the start of the pandemic? Things like flour, sugar, and seedlings, people were baking from scratch at home, people were starting veggie gardens.”

While plastic production continues to increase each year, and only nine percent of all plastic created has ever been recycled, Prince-Ruiz says that she believes the human race is up to the challenge of turning this trend around. Each year the foundation carries out a survey on attitudes, behaviors, and consumer choices. “In September 2020, so despite the pandemic, 92 percent of people surveyed said that we need to be taking more action to reduce plastic waste, which was an increase from previous years,” she says. “ People want to make a difference, they want to live in a clean environment. I think the challenge is how we make that happen, and I think we have individual responsibility as citizens, and I think that we need to call on our governments to put in place the policies for businesses to take responsibility.”

This year, Plastic Free July will commence as usual. The theme will be “Healthy people, healthy planet.”