PLASTIC-FREE FUTURES w/Amy & Ella Meek

Amy and Ella Meek are two sisters that have been on a journey to rid the world of plastic pollution since a very young age. The sisters founded multi-award winning Kids Against Plastic when they were just 12 and 10 years old respectively. Now 21 and 19 they are still very much driving the organisation with support of the KAP Development Team to ensure the initiative continues to be youth led. 

TANITH: Amy and Ella, it’s been 9 years since you founded Kids Against Plastic, how does it feel to have an organisation that is almost a decade old?

ELLA: It’s honestly so insane. We started it when we were so young, and now we're adults and at university, but it just feels like we've come a long way and not just in ourselves, because the progress that we've seen in the charity is shifting away from being about us and our campaigning to involving more of the youth, empowering more young children and getting schools involved. That's what we really wanted to see with the charity. So it's been such a long time, but that progress has kind of shifted away from us in the way that we wanted it too, and it's been an amazing journey.

TANITH: I know that you two personally have picked up a phenomenal amount of plastic litter, but your 1 Million Pick Up campaign (at last check) is up to 876,631 pieces now! Tell us about the campaign and how people can contribute?

AMY: The 1 Million Pick Up campaign is something we're running with one of the youth members of the charity. The charity is about uplifting young people in issues they want to make a difference on. This campaign is spearheaded by one of our members in Spain who’s 11 years old and really passionate about wanting to remove plastic from the environment. She used to do a litter pick every time she walked to school, which made a massive difference in her local community and she wants to amplify the amount of litter picked up, raise awareness about the international picture of litter and how everyone can get involved in tackling that. 

As part of the campaign, on the website we have the map with the rolling total of litter that's collected, which we track through our litter logging app we've developed with ESRI, the Mapping Agency, which people on litter picks use to log each bit as they go along. Then they can add their location and it will appear on our global map of litter picks. 1 million is the target which Ali wanted to get completed by her 11th birthday last year, but a million is a lot of pieces of plastic! We're getting there though. Each week at the Kids Against Plastic Club we do a rolling total of the amount that's been collected. It's really nice to see so many people getting involved. If anyone reading this wants to get involved, you can go to our website and check Ali's map - from there you can see how to access the app and log your own litter picks. 

TANITH: Your Plastic Clever Schools initiative has been incredibly successful over the years but I am aware you have now launched Climate Clever Schools to go alongside. How does it work and how do the two differ?

ELLA: The scheme follows a similar step by step process for schools to complete, which is all about learning about the problems, investigating the challenges within your own specific school and the final stage is acting on those and making changes. Like with Plastic Clever, we provide all of the resources and support a school might need going through this journey. One of the hardest parts is identifying the problems within the school, especially for climate change, so we really support schools through that journey. Plastic Clever and Climate Clever are so interlinked because plastic pollution and climate change are interlinked as problems. That's why the schemes really do work. We've seen schools doing both of them so it is amazing to see the success Plastic Clever has had and then being able to launch the Climate Clever journey as well. To be able to implement two schemes for schools, potentially to get involved in, is really great, and hopefully something amazing for the kids to get involved in and start their own journeys.

TANITH: KAPtat, your campaign to reduce the plastic tat that magazines give away has now led to the setting up of a Sustainability Roundtable with UK publishers which you are a part of - tell us more about this? 

AMY: KAPtat’s been running for a couple of years now, with another young person who’s part of the charity, Skye Neville. She was in the news a couple of times around her campaign and petition, which had an amazing amount of signatures but wasn’t getting the attention it deserved from supermarkets. She got Waitrose involved and they agreed to stop selling magazines with plastic on the front. But it's very hard to drive change in the publishing industry and retail sector. It takes a lot of time and effort, and she did an amazing job. She got in touch to see if we could support and that's where KAPtat came about. 

We targeted supermarkets to stop magazines being sold that had cheap plastic tat on the covers and drive the publishing industry to be more sustainable.We supported Skye through developing letter writing tools to get schools and young people involved. We had hundreds of school kids around the UK writing amazing letters to UK supermarket CEOs, in particular Ken Murphy, who was CEO of Tesco, and the primary person we were writing to at the time. We had amazing letters, Some of the letters also included posters that kids had drawn of Ken Murphy, throwing a plastic bottle in the ocean etc. - amazing and creative things that only kids can get away with! Then we posted letters to the supermarket HQ’s every day for over 100 days. From that we managed to get some meetings with supermarkets, the first one with Tesco, which didn't accomplish a huge amount, so we kept going. Then with Morrisons and a few members of the publishing industry, a few months later. It was great to start a dialog with the publishing industry. There's now been this sustainability roundtable setup, which has members of the industry and members of Kids Against Plastic. It’s not only me and Ella, we’re getting some of the young recipients of these magazines to sit down at a table with members of the publishing industry and tell them what they would want to see on a magazine. It’s not about trying to ruin kids fun or trying to get rid of the toys. It's about trying to make sure that when kids do get them, if it's the only toy that they get for a long time, that it’s something long lasting, that's got good play value, that's sustainable and something that adds value to a magazine and isn't just a five second attraction to try and get it off the shelves. It’s been great to have some meetings so far, and hopefully they will continue into the future.

TANITH: In addition to all of the above (and much, much more we don’t have enough time to cover) you have recently launched Action Academy focusing on empowering young people. How does it work and how can young people access?

AMY: The Action Academy is something we've been thinking about for a couple of years and came about from having so many young people, including ourselves, when we started our journey, wanting to do something about an issue they cared about, but feeling like they lacked some of the confidence or skills to make their voices heard. It’s scary to stand up in front of your peers, adults or large rooms of people and talk about something that is really meaningful to you, never mind knowing how to communicate online, or through letters to MPs or head teachers. It's quite daunting when you're a young person starting your journey, wanting to do something but not knowing where to start. The Action Academy is an online training platform providing tools to young people to develop those key skills. It has three areas that it covers in particular - public speaking, writing and video making - and it's delivered through videos presented by me and Ella and featuring other youth activists who have had their own journeys making a difference. It also contextualises the impact that youth social action can have, not only for young people that get involved, but also for communities and society. As with everything we do, it's completely free. It's accessible through our website and aimed at kids who are part of the Kids Against Plastic Club. but you can also just access Action Academy itself, if you want to do the program and not join the club. We hope that it will be a useful tool for kids in the position we were nine years ago. It's amazing to see kids that are working through it and have completed it and the things they're uploading in their evidence pieces, the presentations they're doing and the videos they're making. It's inspiring and hopefully it'll continue to be something that's used.

TANITH: It’s so impressive how much you have accomplished together over the last 9 years and is demonstrative of how close you are as sisters, but what does the future hold both together and separately?

ELLA: That’s one of those questions that at our age, is still very scary! We are both studying our respective courses at our respective universities, but we're still very close as sisters, which is really nice and the distance hasn't changed that either, which is lovely. I think for our separate journeys, as much as we are going to go off and do our courses, or go into different jobs, we're definitely not leaving the charity behind. I think it's kind of impossible to do that when we've been working on it together for so long. It's a part of our lives now, which is amazing, and as much as the aim of our charity is going to be to pass on a lot of these roles to younger children, to get involved in and flourish in their own ways, it doesn't mean that we're going to be leaving it behind completely, absolutely not. We still want to stay as as involved as we're allowed to be in a charity that's called Kids Against Plastic (as we are technically adults), but we're going to have to see where our separate journeys go. Who knows what the future holds for that, but we definitely know that it will be somewhat related to Kids Against Plastic, youth empowerment and the environment in some way. ∎