No Plastic

Two words, and no ambiguity about what is being asked. What the campaign left behind is the argument itself: ten A3 sheets on single-use plastic, marine litter, microplastics and who is responsible for a thing after it is thrown away.

What we do

Ten printed sheets against single-use plastic, made with GIZ.

No Plastic is a demand, and the demand is the name. What we hold of the campaign is the argument itself, printed: ten A3 sheets that set out what single-use plastic is, where it ends up, what it does on the way, and what to carry instead of it.

The sheets were made with GIZ, on the commission of the German federal environment ministry, and they date themselves to 2022 — by their own print file and by the single-use-plastic rules they cite. They work through the problem in order. What the term means, and how long each item lasts once it is thrown away. Where marine litter comes from, and the finding that most of it never went near the sea. What happens once plastic has broken into pieces small enough to eat. Who is obliged to deal with a product after somebody has finished using it.

Two of the ten do the opposite of the other eight. Instead of asking a reader to refuse something, they name four Indian businesses already selling everyday things without it — cutlery, chocolate, soap, floor cleaner. Both sheets state in print that this is not an endorsement of any company. The line the set closes on is an instruction rather than a slogan: refuse single-use plastic, choose a sustainable alternative. It is the nearest this campaign comes to a demand with a method attached to it.

The posters

All ten, as printed.

No Plastic, the full set

Printed on every sheet: implemented by GIZ, on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety of the Federal Republic of Germany, in partnership with Swechha.

Poster defining single-use plastic as designed to be discarded after one use, with a chart giving each item 20 to 500 years to decompose and a replacement named beside it, over an ocean of floating litter — What’s SUP?

Defines the term, then puts a decomposition span against a bottle, a straw, a pad, a bag, a cup and a fork.

Two-column poster pairing six single-use items — plastic bags, packaged water, straws, tea bags, shampoo bottles — with a named reusable or package-free replacement for each — Alternatives to SUP

Six things to ditch in one column and what to carry instead in the other. Tea bags are on it, which surprises most people.

Poster on marine litter citing UNEP and IUCN: 14 million tonnes of plastic entering the ocean each year, 80% of it from land, 70% reaching the sea bed, and a million seabirds killed annually — Plastic in the Ocean

Marine litter defined by UNEP, and the finding that most of it never went near the sea: 80% comes off land.

Poster explaining microplastics as plastic fragments under five millimetres, their route into salt, fruit, vegetables and packaged water, and an inverted pyramid ranking prevention above reuse, recycling, recovery and disposal — Microplastics

What happens after the litter breaks up, and the waste hierarchy that answers it — prevention first, disposal last.

Poster showing plastic served on a dinner plate, scaling roughly five grams eaten weekly up to twenty kilograms in a lifetime, beside a 2020 finding of microplastics in a human placenta — Cause and Effect

The sheet that stops people: about 5g of plastic eaten a week, and microplastics found in a human placenta.

Poster weighing annual plastic production against the weight of the human population, and splitting all plastic ever made into 9% recycled, 12% incinerated and 79% left in dumps, landfills and waterways — Did You Know?

Where all the plastic ever made actually went. Nine per cent of it was recycled.

Poster citing CPCB on India generating about 1.5 lakh tonnes of waste a day, naming the more than 40 lakh waste pickers who handle it and the diseases carried by unsegregated waste, above an open four-bin segregation unit — Wasted!

The only sheet about people rather than material: the informal sector that handles India’s waste, and what unsegregated waste does to them.

Poster defining Extended Producer Responsibility as the producer’s obligation for disposal and eco-design, drawn as a loop through production, sales, consumption, disposal and recycling — What is EPR?

The one sheet that does not address the shopper. Extended producer responsibility puts the obligation back on whoever made the thing.

Poster profiling two Indian enterprises replacing single-use plastic — one making edible cutlery and plates from wheat bran, one a chocolate maker packaging in upcycled cotton and cocoa bean shells — Replace Plastic. They Did It! (1 of 2)

Two Indian businesses selling everyday things without single-use plastic, with what they sell and how it is packed.

Poster profiling two more Indian enterprises — one selling zero-waste personal care packaged in glass and paper, one selling cleaning concentrates as capsules in a water-soluble film — Replace Plastic. They Did It! (2 of 2)

Two more, on household goods and cleaning — the categories where single-use packaging is hardest to avoid.

The two sheets that name companies carry their own qualification, printed: “Presenting innovative alternatives to everyday items of use, few amongst various initiatives in the country. We do not directly endorse any companies and focus on awareness generation on plastic prevention.” That still holds here.

What it sets out to do

Say what single-use plastic actually is

The first sheet spends its whole surface on the definition and on how long each item lasts. “No plastic” is easy to agree with and hard to act on, and a demand nobody can apply is a slogan.

Name the replacement, not just the problem

Every item the set argues against is paired with something to use instead. Refusing is half a demand; the other half is what you carry.

Put the obligation on the producer too

One sheet is about extended producer responsibility — the duty of whoever made a thing to deal with it after use. The rest of the set asks the shopper. This one does not let the manufacturer out of it.

Strategy and activities

Print, not feed

The set is ten A3 sheets with trim and bleed, made to be printed and put up. It is designed for a reader standing in front of a wall rather than scrolling past.

Every claim sourced on the sheet itself

UNEP and IUCN on marine litter, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on where all the plastic ever made went, CPCB on India’s daily waste, Environment International on microplastics in placenta. The sourcing is set in the artwork, not held in a file behind it.

The rest of how it runs

Show four who already did it

Two of the ten sheets profile Indian businesses selling everyday things without single-use plastic. Both sheets state in print that this is not an endorsement of any company.

Who it is for

Whoever is about to buy one of ten things

The set is built around ordinary purchases — a bottle, a straw, a bag, a tea bag, a shampoo bottle, a sanitary pad. It is aimed at the moment before one of them is bought.

Producers

One sheet is addressed to whoever manufactures and sells, not to whoever uses. It is the only one that asks something of a company.

Whoever handles it afterwards

One sheet is about waste workers — more than forty lakh people in India by the figure it prints — and what arrives in their hands when waste is not separated.

Impact

The whole set survives, and it is here

Ten sheets as printed, recovered from the campaign’s own print file. The extended-producer-responsibility sheet was missing from every working copy we held until 2026 and is back in the set.

A German ministry and GIZ behind it

Implemented by GIZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety of the Federal Republic of Germany, in partnership with Swechha. That credit is printed on all ten sheets.