Mapping the Hidden Loops That Keep a Bangladeshi Campus Hooked on Plastic

Plastic pollution has become one of the defining environmental crises of the twenty-first century, and universities are increasingly being treated as ideal testing grounds for solutions. A new study published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators takes that idea further than most, applying a socio-technical mapping method known as Constellation Analysis to a single question: why does a campus community that knows perfectly well what plastic does to the environment keep using it anyway? The research team, led by M.A. Rahman of Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology (CUET) together with German collaborators, spent two years working with more than 300 stakeholders to draw a complete map of the forces that sustain single-use plastic dependency at a Bangladeshi public university. Their conclusion is striking: the problem is not ignorance, nor a shortage of rules, but a web of missing connections between policies, people, infrastructure, and materials.

The global context gives the study its urgency. More than 400 million tons of plastic are produced annually worldwide, and at least 14 million tons reach the ocean each year, accounting for roughly 80 percent of all marine debris from the surface down to deep-sea sediments. Projections suggest production could exceed 650 million tons by 2050, more than two hundred times the levels of 1950. Bangladesh has a symbolic place in this story: in 2002 it became the first country in the world to ban plastic shopping bags under the Environment Conservation Act. Yet the ban has remained largely ineffective, undermined by weak enforcement, scarce alternatives, and insufficient public engagement. National material flow analyses show plastic consumption of about 1.7 million tonnes in 2019 to 2020, roughly 10 kilograms per capita, with only around 28 percent recycled, mostly through the informal sector. In Chattogram, the city where CUET is located, an estimated 205 tonnes of plastic waste are generated daily, of which only about a quarter is recycled.

What makes the new research methodologically interesting is its choice of analytical tool. Constellation Analysis, developed for interdisciplinary sustainability research, treats a problem as a network of four element types: social actors, technical elements, symbolic elements such as policies and norms, and natural elements such as materials and environmental resources. Relationships between elements are drawn with a standardized notation that includes directed influences, conflicts, and, crucially, missing linkages, which mark expected but absent relationships and therefore potential intervention points. Unlike the Multi-Level Perspective, which explains sustainability transitions at a macro level through niches, regimes, and landscape pressures, Constellation Analysis maps the concrete actors, technologies, rules, and materials of one bounded setting, making it well suited to locating leverage points on a campus with roughly 6,000 students and 500 faculty members.

The researchers built their map through a deliberately participatory, two-stage process. Between December 2022 and December 2024, four events drew in 310 participants in total. An information session with municipal agencies and regulatory bodies placed campus plastic use in its wider governance context. A knowledge-sharing workshop brought together 195 students, administrators, hall authorities, and canteen coordinators to document consumption patterns and operational constraints. A roundtable of academics, policymakers, media professionals, and recycling experts then critiqued the draft maps, and five in-depth interviews with an administrator, a hall authority, an environmental specialist, a head chef, and a jute industry expert tested technical feasibility. Qualitative data were coded by a four-member team using a consensus-based thematic procedure, with every coding decision adopted only after full agreement, and the evolving maps were documented in an audit trail from preliminary drafts to the final consolidated constellation.

The resulting map identifies six social actors, seven technical elements, fourteen symbolic elements, and six material or environmental elements. Among the actors, students emerge as the primary consumers, highly aware of environmental issues but with limited formal influence over procurement and waste policy, a power asymmetry that constrains their agency despite their central role in daily consumption. Shop owners appear as price-driven gatekeepers whose packaging and sourcing decisions follow cost and availability rather than environmental criteria. Dining staff hold critical practical knowledge about waste handling and material use but are systematically excluded from policy design. Two functions are effectively absent from the system altogether: a plastic-ban enforcement capability, and external funders who could finance infrastructure and alternative procurement beyond the university’s budget constraints.

Two self-reinforcing causal loops lie at the heart of the analysis and explain why plastic dependency persists despite widespread awareness. The first is an economic feedback loop: shop owners stock cheap plastic packaging because suppliers offer it cheaply and customers expect it; habitual use sustains demand, which reinforces low-cost sourcing and keeps higher-priced jute alternatives out of the campus market. The second is an enforcement-gap loop: the single-use plastic ban exists on paper but lacks a monitoring relationship and a designated supervisory authority, so non-compliance normalizes continued plastic use, which in turn weakens the ban’s perceived credibility and reduces institutional pressure to resource its enforcement. Because both loops intersect at the shop-owner node, the authors argue that a monitored shop-level ban combined with affordable alternative sourcing could disrupt both simultaneously.

The material side of the constellation is equally revealing. Jute, Bangladesh’s celebrated natural fiber, is the leading candidate to replace single-use plastics, offering biodegradability, low production emissions, and end-of-life options such as composting. Yet stakeholders documented real technical constraints: jute’s moisture sensitivity, described as a leakage problem that limits its use for liquids, and the tendency of jute and paper products to degrade when wet, alongside production costs that exceed those of plastic. One expert participant was unequivocal, saying that if plastic use is to be reduced, an alternative must be provided, and nothing, in their view, could be better than jute. Others called for innovation so that jute could be widely used as a packaging material. Administrators acknowledged the gap between symbolic and operational commitments, noting that while authorities emphasize awareness-raising, they face financial limits on subsidizing jute products and instead encourage local vendors to find affordable biodegradable options.

Quantitative observations from a parallel baseline assessment lend field-based support to the mapped barriers. Campus-wide waste generation, including residential and canteen streams, was on the order of 1.18 kilograms per capita per day, with plastics making up an estimated 8 to 15 percent of the stream and organic matter dominating at roughly 84 percent, a composition consistent with the residential profile of developing-country campuses. A two-stream wet-dry segregation pilot in student halls showed that the infrastructure identified as the system’s missing element is operationally achievable: dedicated wet-waste bins captured organic material almost entirely free of contamination, whereas mixed fractions sharply reduced recyclable value. This corroborates the study’s central claim that source segregation is a critical leverage point.

From the validated map, the team derives four systemic drivers and matching leverage points. Institutional-technical misalignment, in which policies support plastic reduction symbolically but lack integration with procurement, infrastructure, and enforcement, calls for strengthened monitoring with explicit supervisory authority and systematic compliance verification. Economic-environmental value conflicts, where cost minimization overrides environmental considerations across all stakeholder groups, call for procurement reform embedding sustainability criteria alongside incentives. Performance and accessibility gaps in alternatives call for technical capacity building, including performance specifications, separate dumping stations, and proposed plastic-to-jute exchange booths. Fragmented stakeholder coordination calls for frameworks that link students, dining staff, administrators, shop owners, and funders under assigned administrative ownership. Experts suggested pragmatic sequencing, building awareness through campaigns while running enforcement drives that begin without penalties and move step by step toward sanctions, supported by tools such as compliance monitoring and a dedicated regulatory body for the issue.

To make progress measurable, the study proposes a set of candidate indicators for future monitoring, including plastic waste generated per capita, the percentage of campus outlets complying with the single-use plastic ban, the share of waste correctly segregated at source, the proportion of procurement allocated to reusable or biodegradable products, the cost per use of jute bags, and the frequency of audits by the responsible authority. These are prospective measures rather than empirical baselines, since the study is explicitly diagnostic in scope. The authors acknowledge limitations: the single-campus design supports analytical rather than statistical generalization, and future work should extend the constellation boundary to municipal operators and off-campus vendors, integrate quantitative material flow analysis, and pilot the two stakeholder-derived interventions, the shop-level ban and the exchange booth, with baseline and follow-up mapping. Still, the broader message travels well beyond one campus. In a country where pioneering policies routinely falter at the implementation stage, the study reframes plastic dependency not as a behavioral deficit but as an addressable systemic configuration, and it offers the Global South a transferable method for turning symbolic commitments into monitored, operational sustainability.

Subject of Research: Socio-technical mapping of single-use plastic dependency and reduction pathways at a Bangladeshi university campus

Article Title: Status quo mapping for sustainable plastic waste reduction and management: A constellation approach in a university setting of Bangladesh

Article References: Rahman, M., Biastoch, G., Zuthi, M., Khan, F., Hasan, S., & Kraft, E. (2026). Status quo mapping for sustainable plastic waste reduction and management: A constellation approach in a university setting of Bangladesh. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101520. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101520

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101520

Keywords: plastic pollution, Constellation Analysis, Bangladesh, university campus, single-use plastics, jute alternatives, waste management, sustainability indicators, enforcement gap, procurement reform, source segregation, Global South