Promotor: M.L. van Hecke

The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic (LAPP) is a pro bono initiative concerning legal questions on plastics and is founded to address and research the legal issues related to plastic pollution.

Promotor: P.M. Brakefield

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.M. Brakefield, Prof.dr. B.J. Zwaan (Wageningen Universiteit)

Merijn Tinga, the Plastic Soup Surfer, launched the Pick Up 10 campaign. This campaign, supported by Google and National Geographic, uses photo recognition to identify and monitor litter through an app.

Two weeks after 3 October the Leiden canals were still full of plastic disposable cups. Auke-Florian Hiemstra and fellow students have fished thousands of these cups out of the canals and photographed them. Now they put a photo of one of these canal cups on Instagram every day.

Help us spot and clean up the plastic in the canals of Leiden! Leiden University is calling on the good folk of Leiden to help our researchers study the plastic in the city’s canals. And if you’d like our canals to be plastic-free, why not donate towards a fleet of canoes to clean them up?

The Plastic Soup Foundation and Parley for the Oceans hosted the very first Plastic Heath Summit in Amsterdam on 3 October, covering the most relevant and pressing health concerns surrounding plastics and human health. Beyond discussing the latest findings in the field we asked the urgent question:…

A step-by-step approach to building confidence in anxiety-prone young children.

From 27 to 31 January, a workshop on the regulation of plastic pollution based on scientific evidence will be held at the Lorentz Center in Leiden.

On Friday 8 February, the first Plastic Avengers Conference took place in Amsterdam. Initiator Merijn Tinga, the Plastic Soup Surfer from Leiden, brought together ‘independent plastic fighters' to arrive at a manifesto against plastic pollution. The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic was also invited…

Together we can make science open. Find the next step that fits your journey here.

What would be the environmental performance of the Carbon4PUR technology at industrial scale in the future?

On 3 May2017 LAPP participated in a meeting on microplastics at the Plastic Soup Foundation.

In order to choose your master, it is important to do some soul searching. If you know who you are, what you want, and what you find important in life, you will be better able to assess what suits you and what can help you to come to the right decision.

How do you decide which master's programme suits you best?

Leiden University will install over 30 tap water stations in the autumn of 2017 at the various University buildings. The first is already in use.

Have you found a few programmes that interest you? Take the time to find out all there is to know about them.

There are many different ways to find a master.

14 March 2018 a Citizens’ Dialogue about plastic-use in Europe with First-Vice President Frans Timmermans took place in Utrecht. It was one in a series of dialogues organized by the European Commission held throughout Europe. LAPP-student Emily den Boer joined the evening.

On 27 November 2019, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) organized a symposium on the plastic pollution crisis.

LAPP students Emily den Boer and Louise Floris, together with Esther Kentin, wrote about the proposal for a plastic bottle deposit return system that has been discussed in the Dutch Parliament in April 2019.

Promotor: M.T.M. Koper, Co-Promotor: L.B.F. Juurlink

Every Sunday you can help fish plastic and other floating garbage out of the Leiden canals. You can use your own canoe or loan one from Plastic Spotter and join the garbage-fishing fleet. Annetje Ottow, President of Leiden University, was one of the crew on Sunday 4 July.

Shell, our country's largest company, is constructing a vast plastics plant in the United States. And it is doing so at a time when the European Union, led by the Netherlands, is launching a major pact to combat use of plastic.

After studying medicine in Leiden, Diederik Hofstede specialised in plastic surgery. 'I was attracted by its creativity and I enjoy working with my hands.' Cosmetic surgery is just 5% of the work.'

Heterogeneous catalysis is essential to many industrial applications. These catalysts are often comprised of supported nanoparticles, which contain various different surface sites.

This year will see the start of not one but two citizen science projects in Leiden and The Hague. This is the outcome of a large survey among residents and researchers in both university cities. The Citizen Science Lab will help the winners implement their ideas, with support from the University and…

One person can already make a difference, and if all students and academics were eco-friendly, the world would be a much more sustainable place. Plastic Soup Surfer Merijn Tinga opened the academic year in Leiden with this message.

Getting started with active learning & teaching can be as simple as assessing on what is already accomplished. Here are some practical courses of action to begin experimenting with active learning, whether you are a teacher or responsible for the spaces.

It's now possible to measure how many plastic particles there are in our food. Chinese scientists and Leiden professor Willie Peijnenburg applied their new method to lettuce and wheat. Their results were published January 20 in Nature Nanotechnology.

When you have finished your dissertation, it is time to prepare for the defence procedure.

International trade has played a major role in defining the modern global economy. Trade, however, entangles the environmental pressures of economic sectors, giving the illusion of environmental improvements, while the opposite may be occurring.

The last blog of Leiden Law Blog of 2018 was written by Ladislav Kováč. He discusses the proposal for the Single-use Plastics Directive of the EU which was agreed upon on 19 December.

LAPP student Heidi Kaarto and project leader Esther Kentin published an article on the right to regulate in relation to an EU ban on microplastics in a special issue on plastic regulation of Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law.

A team of students from Leiden and Groningen took the second prize at the European final of the BISC-E sustainability competition. Last June, the team had already won the Dutch finals. The students came up with ‘Suckerspheres’, a natural alternative to the plastic micro-particles that are still frequently…

Promotores: Prof.dr. H.S. Overkleeft, Prof.dr. G.A. van der Marel

The aim of this project is to develop, evaluate, and multicentre implement a blended form of cardiac rehabilitation that uses a theory-based approach to guide patients to full self-management.

In recent years, the use of primary data in terrorism research has increased. In order to maximise the benefits of this trend, we want to encourage terrorism scholars to implement open science practices more systematically. This article therefore presents different avenues towards open and reproducible…

Supervisor: Indira Nederpelt

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson, Co-Promotor: F. Witte

Current clients

The Grachtwacht (Canal Watch) conducts research on urban wildlife and the impact of plastic on nature. With our clean-ups, we not only collect waste, but also data. This way we try to find out the source of the waste and turn off the tap on shore. This way there is structurally less plastic in the c…

Below you will find an overview of the publications of The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic.