Emma Portier Davis and her family are members of St Pauls church in Tervuren, Brussels.  Her son Joachim recently inspired the whole chaplaincy with an amazing project to reduce plastic waste.  Emma interviewed him for us and writes about it below:

'An 11 year old member of St Paul’s Tervuren, an Anglican English-speaking church on the outskirts of Brussels, was inspired to do something for the environment by persuading his family to cut back drastically on their plastic waste. During the month of November Joachim managed to reduce his household’s plastic and metals waste by about 75 percent. And he has an important message about climate change and what it means to be a Christian. 

Q: Joachim, can you tell us what you have been doing in November to reduce your family’s plastic packaging waste?

We worked out how much plastic waste we had the previous month – it was 4 large blue bags - and then I made a  list of the different items – juice cartons, milk cartons, shampoo bottles etc – and then thought about what else we could use. So we bought oranges from the market, using our own bags and pressed them for juice and we learned how to make oat milk and did things like buying in shops where we could take our own bags. We didn’t want to swap one polluting waste for another one. I also wrote about what I had been doing in our church newsletter each week and gave some tips to save on waste. 

Q: What inspired you to do this?

There were lots of things really but mainly that I just don’t like seeing all that plastic waste. 

Q: Why is this important to you as a Christian?

We had been hearing about climate change in church and how we should be good stewards for the world. We shouldn’t just sit in church listening to this and then go home and do nothing. 

Q: What were the results of your efforts?

We usually have 4 plastic bags of plastic waste every month for our family of 4 but we managed to cut it down to only 1 bag. One bag holds up to 70 litres of plastic packaging waste so we managed to save more than 200 litres of packaging waste.

Q: What was the hardest thing to give up?

It was hard to give up the shop bought milk. It takes a lot of time to make oat milk. I like the taste of the homemade milk though and the fresh orange juice is much better than the cartons.

Q: What obstacles did you encounter?

We were sometimes in a hurry to get dinner and then my Mummy would end up buying something that was wrapped in plastic that I know we could get in better packaging or could make ourselves, like pizza dough. She called me the plastic waste policeman!

Q: What will you do next?

We want to continue to keep our plastic waste down and try to cut it back even further.

Q: What would you recommend to people across the Diocese who want to try this?

Just do it please because I don’t want to have to move to Planet B.'

How amazing!  Thank you to Joachim for being so inspiring and to his mum Emma for sharing it with us.  Checking how we can cut back on plastic waste is something we can all do.

Please let us know if you have a story that you would like to share with the other chaplaincies in the diocese.