As a kid, Christina Perrine used to go through plastic waste to find discarded bottles that she could reuse to make decorative plastic flowers. Her precocious environmental awareness foretold a story about local action and community resilience in the face of a triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution - the latter particularly from plastics.
Humans produce around 400 million tonnes of plastics each year, enough to fully load over 33 million garbage trucks. If we do nothing, this number will triple by 2060.
Decades later, in 2023, Christina breezed through rural villages in northern Mauritius, covering long distances easily thanks to the small electric motor fitted on her solar-powered bicycle: “I used it to go door-to-door or visit shops and schools where people had stored plastic bottles. I would explain the importance of sorting and recycling, and then I’d collect the bottles to take them to the proper recycling points.”
She recalls: “Even when conditions weren’t ideal, I stayed active. Many people recognized my efforts and told me that very few women do the kind of work I did – that meant a lot to me.”
At that time, Christina was working as a Plastics Ambassador for the Mauritius Plastic Challenge, an initiative led by local civil society organization Mission Verte, with support from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP), implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).