Revealing public attitudes toward ‘substituting plastic with bamboo’ in China: Sentiment and topic analyses using social media data

Jingsong Ji, Xiaoxiao Xu, Vivian W.Y. Tam and Yangzi Zhang

Forest Policy and Economics, 2025, vol. 176, issue C

Abstract: Public attitudes play a critical role in the successful implementation of national policies. However, there is a scarcity of systematic research presenting the Chinese public's sentiments regarding the “substituting plastic with bamboo” policy. With the increasing use of social media platforms for expressing views on policies, this research employs web crawler technology to collect public data from TikTok, Bilibili, and Sina Weibo, and uses statistical analysis and text mining techniques for investigation. The findings indicate that public discourse is strongly influenced by the announcement of related national policies. Commonly identified keywords in the analysis include “plastic bag,” “cut,” “chopsticks,” “moldy,” “single use,” “garbage,” and “buy.” Sentiment analysis reveals that neutral sentiments account for more than one-third of all comments, with positive sentiments marginally outnumbering the negative ones. The negative sentiments predominantly express concerns about the quality and cost of bamboo wares, environmental repercussions, and policy implementation challenges. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic analysis, six key topics were identified based on Coherence and Jensen-Shannon Divergence metrics: economic environmental impact, the feasibility of substitution, impact on daily life, utilization of bamboo wares, production challenges, and policy implications. This research concludes with several policy recommendations. The insights gained from this research can assist the Chinese government and bamboo ware manufacturers in understanding market dynamics and in crafting more effective policies and strategies.

Keywords: Substituting plastic with bamboo; Social media comments; Sentiment analysis; Latent Dirichlet allocation topic model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934125000875
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:176:y:2025:i:c:s1389934125000875

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2025.103508

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().