The Big Plastic Count — a nationwide data platform turning household actions into credible evidence
The Big Plastic Count is a UK-wide campaign enabling households, schools, and classrooms to measure their plastic packaging waste over a single week — then transform those individual counts into a large, credible evidence base that can influence policy, retailers, and major brands.
Crucially, the campaign doesn’t frame plastic as a personal failure. It reframes the issue as systemic: waste is largely determined upstream by packaging and supply-chain decisions, not “consumer willpower”.
Multi-journey product design without complexity
From a product perspective, the challenge was building multiple distinct journeys while keeping the experience simple enough for mass participation:
- Households can sign up, complete a guided submission flow, answer follow-up questions, and receive a personalised plastic profile — both by email and as a downloadable PDF.
- Schools require structure and safety: teachers can register or join a school, create classes, and distribute class-specific submission links so pupils can participate without friction.
- The platform then aggregates submissions into class and school-level reporting, allowing results to be shared meaningfully with teachers, parents, and campaign organisers.
The goal was a system that feels effortless for participants, but still produces data that stands up to scrutiny.
Architecture optimised for reliability, speed, and maintainability
We delivered the platform as a server-rendered Laravel application, using Livewire for the interactive, multi-step flows. This approach gave us a responsive “app-like” experience while deliberately avoiding the operational overhead of a separate SPA frontend — a pragmatic decision for a campaign platform that must be stable, fast, and easy to maintain during live runs.
- Livewire powers the high-frequency UX: multi-step entry, validation, progress, and guided flows.
- Standard Laravel controllers handle “static” or generated outputs such as PDFs, deep links, and email actions.
- Queue-backed jobs support longer-running operations such as outbound messaging, report generation, and integrations — ensuring the user experience remains snappy even under heavy campaign load.
Reporting as a first-class system, not an afterthought
The core engineering value is the reporting layer. The platform computes each participant’s plastic profile from item-level submissions, then rolls those up into meaningful aggregates:
- individual plastic profiles (participant-level)
- class summaries (class-level)
- school summaries (school-level)
- exports and segmentation for campaign analysis and operational decision-making
On top of that computation layer, we generate branded, one-page PDF outputs and structured email reports designed to be shareable — helping the campaign move quickly from “data collected” to “evidence distributed”.
Built for real campaign operations
Beyond the participant experience, TBPC supports day-to-day campaign work:
- segmentation and exports for analysis
- operational visibility during live campaign periods
- structured outputs for stakeholders who need clear, defensible reporting
The result is a platform that is both friendly enough for households and pupils, and rigorous enough to produce trustworthy, scalable evidence.
Check out the live project https://thebigplasticcount.com.
iPhone SE
1280 x 720
