Unpacking Online Discourse on Bioplastics: Insights from Reddit Sentiment Analysis

Bioplastics have been presented as a sustainable alternative to products derived from fossil sources. In response, industries have developed innovative products using biopolymers across various sectors, such as food, packaging, biomedical, and construction. However, consumer acceptance remains crucial for their widespread adoption. This study aims to explore public sentiment toward bioplastics, focusing on emotions expressed on Reddit. A dataset of 5041 Reddit comments was collected using keywords associated with bioplastics and the extraction process was facilitated by Python-based libraries like pandas, NLTK, and NumPy. The sentiment analysis was conducted using the NRCLex, a broadly used lexicon. The overall findings suggest that trust, anticipation, and joy were the most dominant emotions in the time frame 2014-2024, indicating that the public emotional response towards bioplastics has been mostly positive. Negative emotions such as fear, sadness, and anger were less prevalent, although an intense response was noted in 2018. Findings also indicate a temporal co-occurrence between significant events related to bioplastics and changes in sentiment among Reddit users. Although the representativeness of the sample is limited, the results of this study support the need to develop real-time monitoring of the public's emotional responses. Thus, it will be possible to design communication campaigns more aligned with public needs.