Now William wages war on his ‘enemy’... plastic bottles
PRINCE William described single-use plastic bottles as ‘the enemy’ yesterday in a broadside against throwaway culture.
On a three-day visit to Kuwait, he said he and his family recycled as much as possible and his staff had become ‘plastic free’.
‘I hate plastic bottles now and I look at them and I literally think it’s the enemy,’ he said at the Jahra nature reserve on the outskirts of Kuwait City. ‘We have made a difference to the way we live. We’ve made sure when travelling here we only take our metal bottles with us. Lots of metal bottles. You see a plastic bottle and I’m like “eugh!” Horrible, isn’t it?’
The prince met young volunteers from a group called Trash Tag Kuwait, who pick up litter – particularly plastics – from the reserve and other areas. They told William they had collected 57 sacks of detritus from one Gulf beach in a day.
‘It must be quite demoralising for you to be out there all day and then come back and find it all full up again,’ said William, 37. ‘It’s amazing you guys are doing what you do but we need to do more to stop [the pollution] in the first place.
Yousef Al-Shatti, 32, a geologist replied: ‘It’s a global problem and we were fed up of talking about it and wanted to do something about it.’
The prince examined some of the rubbish, including aerosol cans, collected by the volunteers. He told the volunteers about a national litter picking day he had heard about in Malawi, adding: ‘We need a worldwide one, one that happens in everyone’s country.
‘A lot of people lead busy lives, we have a quick, fast-paced life but we need to be more conscious about it in the future. We all need to shift our mindset and you guys are part of the solution. We’ve got to get on top of it and find solutions to these challenges.’
On the first day of his visit William had an audience with the 90-yearold Emir of Kuwait, with a fivecourse feast in his honour.