Abstract:

Mesoplastic pollution (5–25 mm) is a significant but often overlooked environmental issue. While top-down policies aim to reduce plastic waste, they frequently miss the hyper-local, socio-economic factors that underlie pollution, creating a critical gap in effectiveness, data and community engagement. Over a six month period, I led PUNT (Picking Up Neighborhood Trash), a local youth-centered hybrid initiative for citizen science and community service. By conducting and linking case study findings to broader lines of analysis, this paper demonstrates that youth-led cleanups are more than just symbolic acts, and actually serve an invaluable role in the future of reducing mesoplastic pollution. Through repetitive cleanup operations and brand audits across 5 locations representing diverse land uses and socioeconomic conditions, this study reveals two key findings: 1) mesoplastic hotspots are correlated with social gatherings conditioned by local communal characteristics, rather than randomly distributed; 2) Youth targeted products constituted a disproportionate majority of the mesoplastics found in brand audits, highlighting  that youth act as the leading contributors to local mesoplastic pollution. By creating an opportunity for local youth to raise awareness as well as participate in hands-on data collection, PUNT has developed a replicable and scalable model for empowering young people to move from passive consumers to agents of change, informing more equitable local policies and fostering communal accountability.