Plastic Island: Ecogames' Engaging Tool for Plastic Pollution Education
- Aug 2
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 11
Plastic pollution is one of the clearest environmental issues to teach, and one of the hardest to make stick. Ecogames developed Plastic Island, a giant-format game, in collaboration with the Plastic Island (Pulau Plastik) film project and Kopernik, an organisation working on practical solutions for last-mile communities across Indonesia.
This dynamic collaborative game and its compendium activity book and facilitator's guides are used in schools and community groups interested in addressing waste management challenges in their area.
In the Plastic Island game, players work through the causes of plastic pollution directly, cleaning a virtual island of waste and tracking the health of the surrounding ocean as they play. It's built to make the mechanics of the problem tangible rather than abstract, expanding players' understanding about where plastic comes from, where it ends up, and what changes that.
Alongside the game, Plastic Island: An Island Guardian's Activity Book extends into even more in-depth material as a standalone resource, covering single-use plastics, microplastics, recycling and downcycling, waste sorting, composting, and practical alternatives to single-use plastic. Compendium facilitators handbooks for both Primary Schools and Secondary Schools are also available. These handbooks contain tips on how to use the tools in educational settings and include dozens of additional themed classroom friendly activities.
Schools and community groups can use the books on their own or alongside the game.
To help teachers bring Plastic Island into the classroom with confidence, Ecogames also produced a full training video walking through how to run the game, along with suggested add-on activities to extend the lesson. It's available in both English and Indonesian (see below).
The Plastic Island game was one of the outputs of a collaboration between Ecogames; SMP PGRI 3 Denpasar; Kopernik, which works on testing and scaling practical solutions in communities most affected by these issues; and the wider Pulau Plastik team. Their documentary, Plastic Island, follows Balinese activists Gede Robi and Prigi Arisandi as they document plastic pollution across Bali and Java.
The partnership brought together three huge strengths: Kopernik's grounding in what actually works in last-mile communities, the film's documentation of the scale of the problem, and Ecogames' games as the tool that transforms that understanding into direct action for children and communities.
If you're working with schools or communities where plastic pollution is a live issue and want tools that make the problem tangible, please feel free to get in touch to talk through what Alam Santi and Ecogames could offer.