Reasons To Be Cheerful · 13 hours ago

Teenagers Worldwide Are Tackling the Plastics Crisis

When Augustina Besada sailed across the Atlantic in 2018, collecting water samples along the way, every single one contained plastic - even from the most remote corners of the ocean. That finding drove her to stop treating pollution as a recycling problem and start treating it as a design problem, one best handed to the people who will live longest with its consequences. Through Unplastify, the global challenge she co-founded, more than 3,000 teenagers across 25 countries have collectively avoided an estimated 72 tons of plastic - not by raising awareness, but by persuading cafeteria managers, finding bulk suppliers, replacing plastic wrap with banana leaves, and learning, as Besada puts it, "project management with the excuse of unplastifying." What the program quietly demonstrates is that agency, once offered to young people in a real and serious way, tends to grow into something neither they nor anyone else expected. Asked where she hopes Unplastify will be in 20 years, Besada doesn't describe a bigger organization - she says, "Hopefully, we don't exist anymore. Because we solve the problem."