Introducing the Tide Turners Plastic Challenge
The world’s largest youth-led movement taking action to reduce plastic waste and lead change in their communities.
The Tide Turners Plastic Challenge focuses on building the capacities of young people to tackle plastic pollution by raising awareness, fostering community engagement, implementing on-ground solutions and advocating for policy changes.
The challenge has three levels, awarding the Tide Turners a certificate and badge upon completion:
Entry Level: Increase awareness by learning about plastic pollution through our toolkit and taking the Plastic Literacy Test.
Leader Level: Raise awareness among peers, institutions, or communities.
Champion Level: Mobilize communities and authorities in schools, colleges, corporations, and businesses to support solutions through advocacy campaigns.
The Plastic Pollution Problem
What we are working to solve
1) Plastics are the most common litter type on coastlines, the sea surface, and the ocean floor. By 2040, the volume of plastics flowing into the ocean will triple, possibly hitting 37 million metric tonnes per year.
2) This is also an economic issue – reducing marine ecosystem services by up to USD 2,500 billion each year. Plastic pollution alters habitats and natural processes, while reducing ecosystems’ ability to adapt to climate change, directly affecting millions of people’s livelihoods, food production capabilities and social well-being.
The Solution
Our approach to solving the plastic pollution problem
1) To effectively address the plastic pollution problem, we are focusing on raising public awareness and encouraging behavior change, particularly geared towards the 1.8 billion adolescents and young people (aged 10-24 years) who constitute 22.5% of the world’s population—the largest number in history.
2) Young people find peer-to-peer learning to be the most effective approach with positive emotional benefits.1 In response to this, the Tide Turners programme is bringing different movements together so they can learn from each other at the macro-level (Scouts, Guides, CPF, WWF and CEE) but then learn from each other as peers.
Reach and Impact
Global Engagement: Over 950,000 youths engaged across 50+ countries
Empowering Women: 53% of participants are girls and young women
Environmental Impact: Diverted more than 120,000 kgs of plastic from landfills and water bodies, restoring critical ecosystems and endangered habitats
Government Support: National educational authorities in Bangladesh and India have encouraged and, in some cases, mandated for the students to adopt the Tide Turners Plastic Challenge as part of their curricula.
State-Wide Plastic Ban in Bihar, India: A youth-led campaign by Tide Turners successfully resulted in a state wide ban on single-use plastics in Bihar.
Global Advocacy at INC for Plastics Treaty: Tide Turners' youth champions presented fair and inclusive plastic pollution policy at the INC-3 negotiations.
Integration into World Scouts Earth Tribe: The Tide Turners Plastic Challenge has been adopted by the World Organization of the Scout Movement as a core component of its Earth Tribe Initiative , reaching over 57 million scouts and volunteers worldwide.
