Why take part?
3 March 2025
Why are we launching this website and why should you take notice and participate? Some good questions we have tried to answer below.
We are a diverse team of researchers, designers and engineers based at University College London’s Plastic Waste Innovation Hub. We explore issues of plastic waste and recognise that there are no simple solutions, as the wonderful material of plastic is intricately embedded in our lives.
The majority of our clothes and shoes are made of plastic. It is plastic foams that make beds and sofas, pillows comfortable. Without plastic insulation none of our electronics would work including our smartphones. Modern healthcare systems completely rely on plastic as we saw during in the COVID pandemic when PPE was in short supply.
It is when plastic is thrown away that it becomes a major problem. Understanding how we can design products and systems that make recycling and composting plastics easier is one of our goals, but we also recognise that using less plastic will help enormously with waste issues. It can also make products cheaper and the costs of clean-up lower, leading to lower taxes.
This is where we need your help.
We need to better understand how parents and responsible adults are balancing their busy lives and other pressures to look at strategies of how they can be supported better. We also want to understand what methods they are using to do this..
To get this data we need parents and responsible adults to log the process of toilet training a child and share this data on this website. We are hoping to get data from all round the world and to build an accurate picture of different countries and different contexts such as at home or in nurseries. As we collect and analyse this anonymous data we will share the combined findings openly through regular online webinars. We will also invite toilet training and healthcare experts to comment on the data.
We hope that our findings will not only help you understand the factors and context that influence successful toilet training but also the amount of plastic waste that can be avoided without impacting the health of your child.