Youth Groups Design Christmas Manger Using Recycled Materials
PCC Ecological Stewardship and Climate Justice Intern Bedi Racule said the idea was to highlight the issue of plastic waste pollution in oceans especially during Christmas time.
The Pacific Council of Churches has called for greener Christmas this festive season through their collaboration with the Pacific Ocean Litter Youth Project (POLYP) after designing a nativity scene out of recycled materials.
Displayed along Gordon Street, the nativity scene or manger, was an exhibition of colors representing the birth of Jesus.
PCC Ecological Stewardship and Climate Justice Intern Bedi Racule said the idea was to highlight the issue of plastic waste pollution in oceans especially during Christmas time.
“We had no idea how we were going to do it but we knew we just had to figure out,” she said.
“So, we reached out to our friends at the Pacific Ocean Litter Youth Project who are very famous for doing this kind of stuff and pitched the idea to them.
“From there, began collecting trash at the Suva foreshore with our lovely volunteers. Then we consulted uncle google and basically winged it all the way, putting together each element of the nativity using a little ingenuity, some faith and a lot of glue.”
Ms Racule hoped to also highlight the role and importance of youth in communities who are fighting to combat plastic pollution.
She said POLYP has been conducting weekly trash audits of coastal marine debris that had been collected at the University of the South Pacific (USP) foreshore since November 2021.
POLYP is currently conducting a Fiji wide litter survey.
“I hope that the messages we hear today from our church leaders as well as our young people combined with the powerful visual of plastic on this nativity display will spark within us a period of reflection on how we can contribute to a greener Christmas.”
POLYP is a youth collective of students and staff based at USP lower campus seeking to collect and categorise marine litter in Fiji using science and art in order to catalyse behavioral change for consumers and producers and also inform policy.