The study area of the German real-world laboratory (Plastic-FREE-sia) is located in Lower Saxony, in the Weser-Ems region, and largely extends across the administrative boundaries of the district of Friesland (light blue), the independent city of Wilhelmshaven (yellow) and the district of Wesermarsch (green) and the neighbouring Weser. Relevant for the selection of the study area was, on the one hand, the composition of rural and urban areas, as well as the geographical diversity of the region in the test area. The fact that the study area is part of the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea biosphere region and is already actively working on the sustainable development of the region was also a criterion for the geographical definition of the Plastic-FREE-sia real-world laboratory. The aim is to be able to transfer the findings and solutions from this real-world laboratory to similarly structured regions in the long term.

Real-world laboratories as instruments

The unique selling point of TREASURE is its interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and transnational approach. In order to bring about a social transformation, all stakeholders from politics and administration, business and civil society who produce, trade, use, recycle and dispose of plastic products should be involved in the solution process. Real-world laboratories as a new research format for sustainable development can be used as a tool for co-operation between science and practice. In these temporally and spatially limited test spaces, solutions in the form of real-world interventions for complex problems are to be developed in cooperation between science and practice. According to Wanner et al. (2018), this takes place in a cyclical learning process characterised by reflection and variation.