ZOE PRINSLOO
Founder, Save a Fishie (19)
Although Zoe Prinsloo started cleaning Cape Town’s beaches with the Girl Guides at the age of 10, it was when she watched a viral video of a plastic straw being extracted from a turtle’s nose that she knew she wanted to be an environmental activist.
Since the age of 16, Prinsloo has been running her own beach clean-ups.
In 2018, she founded her own social enterprise called Save a Fishie, which sells eco-friendly alternatives to household products – ranging from bamboo toothbrushes to firelighters made from recycled coffee.
“I don’t consider what I’m doing remarkable. I’m doing something everyone is capable of doing!” Prinsloo tells DM168.
“What is remarkable is that every day it seems our planet is on a downward slope. But I carry on, knowing that every piece of plastic I pick up is potentially saving a fishie.”
Prinsloo knows that some people consider beach clean-ups to be pointless interventions because the plastic builds up again as soon as the beach has been cleared. This doesn’t faze her.
“I believe that every piece of litter can be a potential killer,” she says.
The activist believes that one of the biggest obstacles she has had to overcome to date is the responses of others to her young age. “I was about 16 when I started physically running beach clean-ups myself, so it took a while for people to take me seriously and trust that I knew what I was doing, as well as just listening to me,” Prinsloo says.
Naturally, one of her heroes is the teenage Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who has proved that young people can be taken seriously on environmental issues. Prinsloo had the opportunity to hear Thunberg speak in person after she was selected to attend the United Nations Youth Climate Summit in New York in September 2019, an experience she describes as “priceless”.
She doesn’t judge those who are unaware of the scale of the problem she is tackling.
Prinsloo believes that education is the key and says that when she carries out beach clean-ups with schoolkids, many of them are “shocked” by what they find.
“I want to continue working with school children and be able to reach schools inland too,” she says.
“I am always looking to grow the business side of Save A Fishie by selling alternatives to single-use plastics and one day becoming a one-stop eco-shop.”