Molly's environmental poster design wins our Plastic Investigators competition
This brilliant environmental poster by 10-year-old Molly has won our nationwide Plastic Investigators competition – earning £20,000 for her school in Bristol to spend on a recycling and sustainability initiative.
Molly, who's a pupil at Henleaze Primary School, was chosen from more than 6,000 entries to our competition, which aimed to teach children about the importance of recycling and tackling plastic pollution.
Her creative and detailed poster carries an important message encouraging everyone to reduce the amount of plastic they use, re-use the plastic they have, and to recycle plastic once it's been finished with, saying: "When you refuse to reuse, it's the Earth you abuse".
The competition was part of Asda’s Plastics Investigators Club community activity, in which hundreds of schools across the UK used lesson plans and learning materials created by Asda in conjunction with the National Schools Partnership to learn about sustainability and packaging.
As well as classroom-based learning, schools were offered the chance to visit their local Asda store where the local community champion gave tours and talked to pupils about what Asda is doing to help tackle issues around unnecessary plastic and the importance of recyclable materials.
Our Filton store's community champion David Thomas presented Molly and her classmates with the cheque for £20,000.
He said: "All of us at the store are delighted that our local school has beaten off national competition to be crowned the overall winner – well done Molly!
"Plastic reduction is something that is important to us; it's something that our colleagues and customers are really passionate about, and initiatives like this mean we can continue to raise awareness of our commitment to sustainability in our local community."
As part of the schools commitment to sustainable living, each class at the school held elections to appoint a Green Ambassador to form a special eco council and these pupils will present their ideas at the school assembly, where Asda will also present Molly with her prize.
Adam Barber, Headteacher at Henleaze Junior School, said: “The Plastic Investigators competition was a fantastic way of raising even greater awareness of the issues involved.
"We had already been doing a lot of work as a school around single-use plastics, eco-bricks, sustainability and climate change and we decided to use Asda’s learning resources to supplement this work and inspire all our pupils to be Plastic Investigators.”
Gemma Quickfall, Project Director from the National Schools Partnership, said: "There has never been a more important time to teach our younger generations about recycling. With the impacts of plastic use being more visible than ever, the Plastic Investigators programme empowers young people to be a force for change and make a difference to their world. Their passion and enthusiasm for this project resulted in some of the best competition entries we have ever seen, and I hope they continue to ignite that same passionate spark in others."
We have already removed 6,500 tonnes of plastic from across our own-brand lines over the past 18 months, and have recently made further commitments including bringing forward our target to reach 30% recycled content in plastic packaging to the end of 2020 – five years ahead of our original deadline – and reducing the total amount of plastic used in our own-brand packaging by 15% by February 2021. We will also trial a number of new refillable and reusable packaging solutions during 2020 as part of our ‘test and learn’ approach to innovation.