Do you see the animal in this photo? (wait 10 seconds) That took a while to find, didn’t it? Because it’s drowning in a sea of plastic.
They’re dying. We’re next. From the tiniest corals to big, majestic whales, more than 700 marine species die either by the ingestion of plastic or entanglement - resulting in more than 100 million animal deaths a year. And that’s only what’s reported. Imagine how many more deaths we’re missing.
Right now there are more than 51 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean. Let that sink in. That's 51 trillion deadly hazards that animals need to avoid. If you’re finding it hard to imagine just how much plastic that is, it’s equivalent to 1,345 adult blue whales. That’s 500 times more than the number of stars in the galaxy.
This is Break Free From Plastic. A global movement lead by Filipino visionaries and other changemakers from more than 20 countries, and supported by more than 100 major environmental groups including Greenpeace, Oceana, and Zero Waste Europe. Their goal is to stop plastic at its source by sparking conversations about the devastating cost of plastic abuse. Since their launch in September 2016, nearly 1,500 organization from all over the world has joined their cause. Together, they demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and pushing for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis.
On social media, they use #breakfreefromplastic to drive conversations and forge solidarity between eco warriors online. On Twitter alone, this hashtag has been used more than 50,000 times between January 2017 to July 2019. We wanted to know the community’s reception of the movement through these tweets. More deeply, we wanted to examine the conversations that people were having when they use this hashtag.
OCTOPARSE( CONTENT SCRAPED) REMOVE ALL WHICH DON’T HAVE CONTENT, AND NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE (85% EN)
CLEANING: REMOVE URLS, USERNAMES, RT, FROM 60K+ DOWN TO 45k+
SIMPLIFICATION: MEASURE RATE OF INTERACTION, SENTIMENT, HASHTAG USAGE
CAN BE APPLIED TO OTHER CAMPAIGNS