Message with bottles: Indian children break world record raising plastic pollution awareness

NEW DELHI: Ten-year-old Indian environmentalist Licypriya Kangujam and children from a school in the outskirts of Delhi broke on Friday the world record for spelling out a sentence with 6,056 water bottles to raise awareness about climate change and plastic pollution.

A student at Ryan International School in Noida, Kangujam is the founder of the Child Movement and one of the world’s youngest climate activists.

It took her, her 8-year-old sister Irina Kangujam, and Ryan International School students nine minutes and two seconds to arrange plastic water bottles into the sentence “Save our planet and our future.”

Guinness World Records has yet to verify the total, but its current record is 3,325 bottles in 45 minutes, achieved in the UK by St. Edward’s Prep School in Reading, UK, in February 2022, with the line “There is only one Earth.”

“It’s not about breaking the world record. We are fighting one of the biggest problems of our time, it is climate change and plastic pollution crisis,” Kangujam told Arab News.

One of the world’s biggest polluters, India produces 3.5 million tons of plastic waste a year.

“This is very bad for our ecosystem. This is also linked to our air pollution,” the fifth grader said. “Our effort will help in reducing the single-use plastic pollution crisis in the country and through this we can make a big impact, big change.”

For Friday’s feat, she and her sister collected the bottles from neighbors, hotels, shops, and restaurants. They are going to send them all for recycling.

The event was witnessed by independent experts for later submission to Guinness World Records.
 
“It was a nice experience to see students using used bottles of 200 ml and using over 6,000 bottles to form the sentence,” said Prof. Binod Kumar Singh of the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, one of the experts who acted as surveyor.

“There is a certain pro forma that I will fill and send to the Guinness World Record,” he told Arab News.

Kangujam started her environmental advocacy four years ago. In June 2019, inspired by the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, she held a protest outside India’s parliament to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pass climate change legislation.

In 2019, she addressed the UN Climate Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain calling on the world leaders to take immediate climate actions to save the future of the younger generations.

She made international headlines again in June this year, when she drew attention to plastic waste pollution at the Taj Mahal mausoleum in Agra — one of the most renowned Unesco World Heritage sites.
 
“I wanted to send a strong message about global plastic pollution crisis to the people,” she said. “I have been representing the voice of millions of children of the world.”