Have a rubbish time with friends and family in the week leading up to Earth Day on Saturday 22 April!
- Hold an eco coffee morning and serve up some eco bakes that shrink your foodprint.
- Make it a car-free week. Walk or cycle everywhere and donate the fuel money you save.
- Inspire your young people to enter our junk-modelling competition.
What’s Earth Day all about?
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is ‘invest in our planet’. Marking Earth Day 2023 is the perfect way for you to support Bin Twinning’s global network of social enterprises that are responding to the environmental crisis caused by single-use plastics.
With every £45 you raise or donate between 17-22 April, you will be funding waste management enterprises that are saving lives, protecting the environment and creating thousands of green jobs.
Have a rubbish week!
With friends or family At your workplace At your school At your church
With a uniformed group At your local group
Why Earth Day is so important
Country spotlight: Democratic Republic of Congo
In December 2022, more than 100 people were killed in landslides and floods in DRC’s capital city of Kinshasa. They were the worst floods in years, and evidence of why Kinshasa’s plastic problem is deadly.
With no formal plastic waste collection in Kinshasa, people who live close to the river often throw their waste into it. The plastic stops the river from draining properly. In December 2022, some places saw two metres of flood water, filled with waste, reach up to people’s roofs.
Bin Twinning’s DRC partner runs a hub where waste pickers are paid by the kilo for plastic bags and bottles. This plastic is then sent to a factory where it is melted down and mixed with sand to become eco paving bricks.
‘Thanks to this work, we can send our children to school and they have food to eat. We can afford to go to hospital if we are sick. Some of us have even built houses,’ says François, the manager of a waste collection point.
Before mum-of-four Jeanne got a job in the brick-making factory, she was struggling to earn enough to feed her children once a day. Now, life is still difficult, but she can at least afford three meals a day, and her children go to school. And, she’s proud to have a job that is helping the local environment.
‘Here in Kinshasa, the waste is a big problem because people throw it wherever they want. With this job, we raise awareness about the flooding problems that are caused by plastic blocking the river. And we transform the plastic into useful things. It no longer brings disease but makes life better.’
Click to watch Jeanne tell the story of Bin Twinning’s work in Kinshasa, DRC.