Hello, and welcome! My name is Dr. Hanna Dijkstra. I’m a plastic pollution and solutions researcher, consultant and now, communicator. After many years writing academic articles and polished reports, I recently dipped my toe into creative writing and personal narratives, and its been a game changer. Realizing I love writing has been a surprising joy of 2025, but actually sharing that writing is an exercise in facing fear. So here I go, diving straight in by launching this newsletter and inviting you to join me….

When you work in a bubble, you forget there is a whole world of people who don’t swim in the same circles as you. For those of us in the ‘plastics bubble’, the next two weeks are all about the treaty, and for those not in the bubble, you may be wondering what this ‘treaty’ is. Acronyms like INC and CG mean nothing and phrases like ‘like minded coalition’ and ‘zero draft’ sound like nonsensical jargon…

After my last post on the struggle of sustainability - complicated trade-offs, limited options - I got hit with unexpected backlash. I posted a snappy LinkedIn teaser about my blog (in hindsight, too snappy) and a commenter called me out for “plastic misinformation campaigns dressed up in folksie passive strategies”. Ouch…

I recently stayed with my aunt, Tía Tina, in New York City. She had just watched the Canal+ documentary on the Henderson Island expedition that I had joined and had a question for me. The movie is incredible; it shows the challenges of getting to a remote, polluted island, the hard work of cleaning up a sweltering beach and includes some delightfully cinematic moments of plastic sailing over a coral reef carried by a pink and purple parasail….

If you run in any of the same professional circles as I do, then your LinkedIn has been absolutely inundated with events, pictures, recaps and posts about being ‘grateful’, ‘delighted’, ‘pleased’ or ‘energized’ to have been at UNOC. It has been a deluge and I have been scrolling frantically, desperate to see something other than groups of lanyard-ed people in front of blue backdrops….

We humans never seem to quite get a grasp on the fickle nature of spring weather. One afternoon we’re sitting in tank tops, playing hooky from work and basking in the fresh sun. When warm spring days begin in the Netherlands, the sidewalks and plazas explode with people sitting al fresco on terraces. The Dutch even turned this pastime into a verb “terrassen” - which means to sit on a terrace, with a cappuccino or, even better, a glass of white wine….

Earlier this year, I found myself in a greenhouse in the garden of a community center in Amsterdam West learning how to make earrings out of bottle caps. I had signed up for this community workshop because - after spending hours in front of my computer all day reading, researching, thinking and talking about plastic solutions - I was ready to get my hands dirty (and maybe burn a finger or two in the process)….