Bye Bye Plastic Bags
"Welcome to Bali," say the Balinese sisters Melati and
Isabel Wijsen, palms pressed together in the traditional
Balinese greeting gesture. “Do you have any plastic
bags to declare?” This is the question the sisters put
to visitors as they land at Bali’s International Airport.
Melati and Isabel picture a day when plastic bags
are illegal throughout Bali. "We want people to arrive
on the island and find there are no plastic bags,"
Melati says.
In the old days, Balinese people used only organic
materials and left no waste behind. But today the
island is buried in rubbish. Much of Bali’s rubbish is
never collected: some of it is burnt and pollutes the
air badly, while some is simply thrown into rivers. “In
Bali we produce 680 cubic metres of plastic every day,
since almost everything you buy comes wrapped in
plastic bags. That equals the size of a fourteen-storey
building,” Isabel says. "Sadly, fewer than five per cent
of the plastic bags ever get recycled."
Plastic poses a threat to wildlife around the world.
Plastic bags cause the deaths of fish and other animals.
Not long ago, a whale was found with more than 80
plastic bags in its stomach. It died because the plastic
had made it impossible for the whale to hunt and feed.
Before it died, it had suffered for several days.
When they were 10 and 12 years old, Melati and Isabel
had a lesson at Green School in Bali about change
makers such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King,
and Mahatma Gandhi, and they asked themselves: “What
can we, as kids on the island of Bali, do to make the
world a better place?” They knew rubbish was a big
problem in Bali that seemed almost impossible to solve.
Then they discovered that Rwanda, a country in Africa,
had banned plastic bags back in 2008. “If one of the
poorest countries in the world could manage that, Bali
should start to act as well,” Melati says. So the sisters
decided not to wait until they were older.
That is why they founded the campaign Bye Bye Plastic
Bags. They gathered thousands of signatures, organized
beach clean-ups, and gave school presentations. The
girls were even invited to give a video talk for a
well-known Internet channel in London, and they have
inspired Bye Bye Plastic Bags campaigns all over the
world.
Although well known by then, it was a challenge to get
the attention of the Balinese governor, who did not
take the matter seriously at first. For a year and a
half, Melati and Isabel tried to meet him - without any
success. “We handed in thousands of signatures, but
there was no reaction,” Melati says. Then, on a trip to
India, they gave a talk and visited the home of Mahatma
Gandhi, who had reached his goals through peaceful
actions such as marches and hunger strikes in the
1940s. Having learned about the power of hunger
strikes, the girls - still frustrated that the governor
had not reacted - decided to start a hunger strike of
their own. It succeeded because of a huge reaction on
social media, and twenty-four hours later the governor
agreed to help. He even sent the police to escort
Melati and Isabel to his office and was proud of them
in the end.
Melati and her sister believe that the voice of the
youngest generation deserves a wide response. “We are
the future, but we are here now and we are ready.
We’ve learned that kids can do things. We can make
things happen.”
