Three pupils from Mulberry Park Educate Together, Bath, recently travelled to Westminster, London, to participate in The Big Plastic Count’s Youth Empowerment Day.
The pupils joined children from 12 other primary schools from across the country to talk to their MPs about The Big Plastic Count and the UK’s plastic waste problem, with over 40 MPs from across all major political parties committed to attend.
The pupils took part in sessions learning about MPs, Parliament and the Global Plastics Treaty. They then took part in a creative session where they wrote poems and created plastic art to deliver to their MP. Then in the afternoon, they visited Portcullis House, UK Parliament, and had face-to-face meetings with several MPs where they were able to lobby for more action on plastic.
“I thought it was important to go because when we are older, we will be the people living in this world and we need to save it,” said Mila, one of the pupils from Mulberry Park Educate Together. “We want to have a world that’s nice to live in. I enjoyed listening to the activists about what they do to stop plastic waste.”
“We met MPs and I got to ask them questions that I had written about plastic,” added Sofia. “There’s lots of plastic and we are using too much. It’s making the world really bad and some fish living in the sea are eating plastic. We then eat this fish and it could make us sick.”
“Did you know plastic in the ocean takes more than 480 years to degrade?” asked Lucas. “It’s important that we talk to be about plastic pollution so that we can make a change. My favourite part of the day was speaking to the MPs because it was good to have someone to talk to who understands and can take what we say to Parliament.”
“All pupils at Mulberry Park took part in The Big Plastic Count as part of the Learn Together curriculum learning within the ‘An Ethical Approach to the Environment’ strand,” explained Laura Binns, Head of school and Senco. “The Big Plastic Count saw participation from nearly 225,000 individuals, from over 77,000 households, and numerous members from community groups and businesses across the UK. This figure included 28,000 pupils from over 5,000 school classes, demonstrating the desire for change amongst young people.
“The results found that UK households are throwing away an estimated 1.7 billion pieces of plastic a week – that’s 90 billion pieces per year. Worryingly, 58% of this plastic waste is getting incinerated and only 17% is actually recycled. We hope that we can continue to raise awareness of this within our community and lobby for change.”