We invited 13 year old Millennium Kid Sophia to share her perspective on Climate Change. Her use of personal experiences to explain her perspectives left us in no doubt that young people are aware of issues and solutions. Sophia focused on waste, recycling and car emissions as she contrasted her bottle recycling experience using the cumbersome system in her LGA compared with examples that she has experienced in Germany and the UK.
“I live in the City of Swan, in the Ellenbrook area. Unfortunately, my nearest recycling centre is almost 10km away, at the Bullsbrook Recycling Centre. A week ago, I travelled there in a car, as it isn’t accessible by public transport. I took two large bags of garden waste, a bag of plastic lids, a bag of metal lids and a bag of soft plastic, along with three months’ worth of eligible bottles for recycling.”
Sophia described her experiences travelling to three different drop-off points, a total of 53km, and questioned the environmental benefits compared with the car emissions from the journey She then explained that “In Germany, they too have a bottle recycling system, which has been operational since before the 21st century. At all supermarkets, there is a bottle-crusher. The customer simply feeds in their bottles, and the money they earn from returning them is automatically taken off their grocery shop. This is easy sustainability. In fact, the supermarket near our guesthouse was within walking distance, with a pedestrian priority zone going to it. I didn’t even have to burn any fossil fuels!”
Sophia explained that getting rid of plastic packaging would dramatically reduce the waste problem and went on to contrast the situation where one of our supermarket chains is increasing the packaging by phasing out their deli section. She found that in the UK several large chains “have created carbon-neutral, plastic-free stores.
These stores work by having large dispensers of products such as pasta and cornflakes, and liquids such as shampoo, conditioner and detergent. The customer brings their own packages for these items, and the product is sold by individual weight, rather than in pre-packaged quantities. Fruit and veg is sold loose and unpackaged, and bread and deli items are plastic free. The first of these stores opened in 2018.”
Sophia’s BIG Question – Here in Perth, why don’t we have sustainable infrastructure, that is easy to use and accessible for the wider community to make sustainability easy?