2018 has seen a spike in environmental activism. You started 3 years ago. What prompted that?
“People were being too blasé about their plastic consumption and images from scientists showed that the global crisis is actually plastic pollution. I realised we had very little discourse on this problem. My campaign aims to raise awareness and to share that it’s every individual’s responsibility to eradicate waste and single-use plastic.
A few years back I Instagrammed a shocking sight of plastic rubbish floating around Port Klang’s Royal Selangor Yacht Club (RSYC), urging the public to stop littering. Immediately the plastic and rubbish were cleaned up by the authorities. The Selangor government invested RM2million to clean up its rivers. Last year I posted a follow-up post of a dramatically pollution-reduced RSYC.”
How is the awareness now compared to when you started?
“Better, but still a long way to go. In mid 2000s I headed a Sustainable Development and Environmental Communication project for a top French company, and the discourse back then was to reduce carbon emissions, carbon footprint, global warming with eco sustainable methods. 4 years ago, I realised the environmental issue was larger than this; it was the fact that our growing global population had a very lackadaisical approach to how much plastic is discarded. Plastic pollution was not listed by the Malaysian youths interviewed in the TN50 Youth Canvas for Environment – This iterates the importance of #beatplasticpollution and #sayno2plastic in society.”
We use and throw one-time plastic ware that doesn’t miraculously disappear. Now, our oceans are clogged with billions of tonnes of plastic.
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