Environment Protection
Beach cleaning, a part of my Duke of Edinburgh’s program, ignited my interest in knowing more about what causes environmental damage and how to reduce it. In my research around the topic of environmental damage, I learned about initiatives like ESG, SDGs. This led me to finding out ways to help the environment. I go to a beach near my home every other week to collect plastic bottles and the other waste (2-3 bags of 50 gallons each) and give it for recycling.
I used to put the bottles and the waste in government-sponsored waste collection centres but towards the end of 2020 when Al Osra, a supermarket chain in Bahrain, started the initiative of exchanging bottles with coupons that could be used to get discounts on various products and services, I started to deposit plastic bottles at the machines installed by them and not use those coupons as my way of supporting their initiative.
I was keeping a rough count of the bottles I was collecting (a bag of 50 gallons can hold about 100 bottles) and had set my first target of 10,000 bottles. When I completed that in the year 2020, I was searching on the web for what you could do with those many bottles. I chanced upon an article that mentioned that Containers for Change and Western Australia Return Recycle Renew made a giant black swan out of 10,000 bottles in Yagan Square, Perth, Australia to increase awareness on how plastic bottles affect our environment.
I am sure they did not mean black swan as used by Nassim Taleb in his book of the same name as environmental damage caused by plastic is no longer a highly improbable event – it’s staring you right in your face.
Link to Al Osra initiative of exchanging plastic bottles
Black swan with 10,000 bottles
Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (I love this book)
