The Warrior Youth SA team convinced shoppers at their local Woolworths to join their Trash Mob by handing out paper bags and undressing food packaging.
Cape Town, South Africa – Warrior Youth is a new organisation that was started to empower South Africa’s youth to take a stand against pressing issues. Matthew Furlonger and Jess Sjouerman were the brains behind their very first event.
The Trash Mob is their first initiative, and they’re on a mission to get South African supermarkets to #kicktheplastichabit and to remind everyone that the Rand is the most influential vote – “where and how we spend it speaks louder than our values, opinions and beliefs”.
“Many of us don’t realise the enormous power our purchasing decisions have to shape a cleaner, greener, safer and more equal South Africa.”
“So on Saturday, July 13th, we rallied a bunch of friends together and stood outside Woolworths in Constantia Village handing out free paper bags and encouraging people to unwrap their food of unnecessary plastic and dump it in a trolley outside the store.
In spite of the bewilderment on many faces, they were all too happy to ditch their plastic with us and were even shocked to see how many useless layers of packaging there were as they were unwrapping their food. We were able to fill up an entire trolley in under 2 hours, which we handed to Woolies’ management as a polite way of telling them “we don’t want your trash”.
By handing in a trolley filled with plastic, the group were able to highlight just how unnecessary some of the plastics were for the foods being sold.
“Although hesitant at first, Woolies were supportive of the campaign message and wanted to assure us that they have every intention of reducing plastic and moving towards more eco-friendly alternatives. We’re here to hold them to it.
We’re holding our next Trash Mob again today in honour of Mandela Day outside Checkers in Sea Point, who have welcomed us and shown great enthusiasm towards this initiative. We’re aiming to fill up a few more trollies today!”
The whole concept of a Trash Mob is brilliant and might get the attention of the power players in this big corporate stores to listen. You can follow their initiatives via their Facebook page here.
Take a look at their first successful Trash Mob below.
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