Wills: Litter makes George cross
PRINCE George has been litter-picking at school but gets ‘confused and annoyed’ that the rubbish keeps reappearing, his father has revealed.
The eight-year-old couldn’t understand why people keep throwing their mess away, Prince William said. He warned that it would be an ‘absolute disaster’ if George, now in Year 4 at Thomas’s Battersea prep school, London, also had to campaign about environmental issues as an adult.
In an interview with BBC Newscast ahead of his Earthshot environmental awards on Sunday, the Duke of Cambridge said: ‘George at school recently has been doing litter-picking, and I didn’t realise but talking to him the other day he was already showing that he was getting a bit confused and a bit sort of annoyed by the fact they went out litter-picking one day and then the very next day they did the same route, same time and pretty much all the same litter they picked back up again.
‘He couldn’t understand, he’s like, well, we cleaned this. Why has it not gone away?’ William, 39, added that he felt ‘bad’ and did not want to give his children the ‘burden of that worry’ about the climate crisis, but admitted that it was ‘dawning’ on them.
And on a more strident intervention, William said the fact that governments had found enough money to fund a Covid vaccine and create a furlough scheme in light of the pandemic proved we could work to repair the planet. ‘I think younger generations will see that and use that to say, “well if we can fix this... we can also tackle environmental challenges”,’ he added.
William also appeared to criticise billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for pioneering space tourism over repairing the planet. He said: ‘We’ve seen everyone trying to get space tourism going’, adding: ‘We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go live.’
But when asked if he had any interest in going into space himself, he said: ‘I have absolutely no interest in going that high.’