William, 3, picking up plastic left by ‘silly humans’
HE’S only three – but William Mosley is already a passionate environmental campaigner with strong opinions about ‘ silly humans’ flooding the world with plastic waste.
Inspired by a TV programme about the damage being done to oceans by rubbish such as bottles and bags, he started at home with a thorough examination of the contents of the kitchen.
Working with his mother Charlotte Heritage, 29, he was appalled to find almost every food item was either contained in or covered with plastic, from fruit and vegetables to bottled water and pasta.
Inspired, they went straight out to look around their neighbourhood in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, for plastic waste. Sadly, they found plenty. Using a grabber, William filled a bag with more than 100 items of rubbish discarded within a mile of their home.
Mrs Heritage said: ‘Every time William picked up some plastic he would say “very silly humans” for dropping litter on the streets. He has learnt about how littering in the streets can result in plastic travelling into our oceans by falling into rivers.
‘There’s a river in Ramsey and we could see plastic bottles in the water but we couldn’t get those. However, we did get the ones on the bank and there were lots of sweet wrappers too.’
Volunteers across the country recently took similar action for the Daily Mail’s Great Plastic Pick Up, part of the paper’s Turn The Tide On Plastic campaign.
William has continued his fight against plastic during a family holiday to Tenby, Pembrokeshore, where he was out picking up rubbish on the beach at the weekend.
Mrs Heritage, who runs a business with her partner Andy Faville, 44, reclaiming materials to make furniture, said she was proud of her son’s response to the Sky TV show Ocean Rescue: Dive In And Do It.
It had taught him how ‘single-use plastics were the worst’ and he was now ‘telling everyone about it’.
‘He told off one of his friends this week for using a plastic straw because it was single-use plastic,’ she added. ‘As a family, we love nature and I try to tell William as much about the environment as possible and that he and other children are our future.’