Sisters Amy and Ella, 18 and 16, set up a charity, Kids Against Plastic, to help fight plastic pollution.
As well as speaking with aviation leaders and at the UN, the siblings, from Nottingham, have personally collected 100,000 pieces of rubbish, one for every sea mammal killed by plastic pollution every year.
Here Amy talks about why winning the award is so important…
It’s the first year that the Pride of Britain awards have included their Environmental Champions award, and to be able to receive it alongside my sister Ella is an honour I could never have imagined.
In usual Pride of Britain style, our award presentation featured a surprise – or in our case, a couple of surprises, one of which was a video from the Prime Minister congratulating us from the G20 summit in Rome.
At that summit, nearly all G20 countries have come forward with new sets of targets to reach net zero by around mid-century.
But, with Boris Johnson himself saying progress had “inched forwards”, I can’t help but wonder just how effective this new set of agreements will really be.
After all, the impact of targets comes down to their delivery – they count for nothing if they have no action behind them.
The Government’s 2018 plastic target for schools is a prime example. In 2018, the then Education Secretary Damian Hinds set UK schools the target of eliminating unnecessary single-use plastic from the school environment by 2022.
And then… did nothing. We’re now in November 2021, and schools are still lacking the support or encouragement to meet this target.
So, Kids Against Plastic – the charity I founded with Ella in 2016 – has decided that it’s down to us kids to take the action required to meet this target.
We’re running our Plastic Clever Schools programme in collaboration with Common Seas, a free initiative that helps primary schools to reach (or even, smash) the Government target through three simple stages – Inspire, Investigate, Act.
Each stage is delivered through tailored resources and a website that breaks down the steps, allows schools to share progress and encourages collaboration towards a common goal of a smarter use of single-use plastic – or being Plastic Clever.
The aim is that by the end of the initiative, schools will have cut down on their top four problem plastics and educated their pupils on plastic pollution.
Importantly, this programme is a chance for kids to bridge the gap between the Government’s empty target, and the solution needed.
COP26 cannot afford to follow in similar pattern to the plastic targets for schools – with COP26 being the “last chance” to keep global warming below 1.5C, it cannot just be a summit of empty goals.
So, if the PM wants to support environmental champions and protect the vulnerable people most impacted by the climate inaction to date, then he needs to make sure that COP26 delivers action, not just rhetoric.
- Go to www.plasticcleverschools.co.uk to find out more about the sisters’ schools programme.
