Plastics pollute all environmental compartments because of human activities and mismanagement. Public perceptions and knowledge about plastic pollution differ among individuals and across different jurisdictions. Targeted survey-based research tools can help measure consumer awareness about the impacts of mismanaged plastics and help identify trends and solutions to reduce plastic use and plastic pollution. This review primarily focused on survey-based research from presenters at the scientific track session TS-2.15 Plastic Pulse of the Public at the 7th International Marine Debris Conference (www.7imdc.org) and supplemented by contemporary literature. Survey-based research helps provide new insights about public opinions related to the pervasiveness of plastic pollution. This review includes results about consumer use and perceptions of plastic pollution impacts from diverse studies from nine countries including Ghana, Kenya, Bangladesh, Pakistan, United States, Canada, Norway, Germany, and United Kingdom. Overwhelmingly, public perceptions and consumer awareness of the negative impacts of plastic pollution were extremely high, regardless of geographic location. Awareness about the environmental impacts of plastic waste and plastic pollution was highest within younger, white, female, and well-educated demographic groups. However, differences were observed in public attitudes toward willingness to pay for sustainable alternatives, end-of-life plastic uses, unintended consequences, recycling, and mismanagement.

Fast fashion, with its focus on cheap clothing and everchanging trends, has an enormous negative environmental and social impact. Despite rising consumer awareness and slow fashion as an emerging trend, many consumers often still rely on fast fashion. This research aims to create insights into why customers keep returning to fast fashion and what is holding them back from buying sustainable fashion. This is done through a quantitative survey (n=521) and qualitative semi-structured interviews (n=9). Based on the findings, opportunities are defined for designers on how, where, and when to intervene, and on which target group to focus. The main obstacles that counter slow fashion are (i) a lack of understandable and clear information, (ii) the price or available budget, and (iii) the importance of social influence. Strategic design interventions should focus on educating eco-conscious and social-conscious customers based on their personal definition of sustainable fashion. By providing in-store information during time of purchase, designers can create new shopping experiences, educate customers using a positive note and build customer relations with the retailer. Further research should extend these insights with retailers' perspectives.

The USA is the largest consumer of legally, internationally-traded wildlife. A proportion of this trade consists of species listed in the Appendices of CITES, and recorded in the CITES Trade Database. Using this resource, we quantified wildlife entering the USA for 82 of the most frequently recorded wildlife products and a range of taxonomic groups during 1979–2014. We examined trends in legal trade and seizures of illegally traded items over time, and relationships between trade and four national measures of biodiversity. We found that: (1) there is an overall positive relationship between legal imports and seizures; (2) Asia was the main region exporting CITES-listed wildlife products to the USA; (3) bears, crocodilians and other mammals (i.e. other than Ursidae, Felidae, Cetacea, Proboscidea, Primates or Rhinocerotidae) increased in both reported legal trade and seizures over time; (4) legal trade in live specimens was reported to be primarily from captive-produced, artificially-propagated or ranched sources, whereas traded meat was primarily wild sourced; (5) both seizures and legally traded items of felids and elephants decreased over time; and (6) volumes of both legally traded and seized species were correlated with four attributes of exporting countries: species endemism, species richness, number of IUCN threatened species, and country size. The goal of our analysis was to inform CITES decision-making and species conservation efforts.