This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
8 min read
When students in Singapore looked around their school cafeteria, they could see a problem shared all over the world: Single-use Styrofoam was ubiquitous. They soon learned that the school’s 2,000 students used 72,000 pieces of Styrofoam and other types of plastic every year.
To find a solution, they joined the Unplastify Challenge, a global movement initiated by the Latin American social enterprise Unplastify and funded by the National Geographic Society, a nonprofit that seeks to foster environmental stewardship.
What makes the program unique is its audience, design and scope. Teenagers, usually 15 to 16 years old, design and implement solutions to “unplastify” their schools, communities, neighborhoods and homes. In Singapore, the students decided to campaign for multi-use lunch boxes, winning them first place in the Unplastify Challenge 2026, the 12th such event of its kind.
In the eight years since it began, Unplastify has worked with over 3,000 students at 400 schools in 25 countries, mostly in Latin America, but also in Africa, Asia, North America and Europe. Together these students have come up with over 1,000 strategies, leading efforts to avoid an estimated 72 tons of plastic.
In Chile, students have designed a biodegradable alternative to plastic glitter, thus avoiding four kilos of plastic in a single year. In Costa Rica, students have replaced plastic sponges with natural luffa. In Turkey, teenagers have researched biodegradable alternatives to medical equipment such as plastic gloves, eventually extending their work into health clinics. In Brazil, young people have worked with the supplier of their school uniforms to eliminate polyester, which is a petroleum-based plastic fiber. In Columbia, students have collaborated with grocers and butchers to replace plastic wrap with banana leaves.
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Instead of just raising awareness, Unplastify equips teenagers with the knowledge to have real-world impact — through project-based learning and hands-on action. Unplastify offers online training materials that help young people identify a problem, but the students themselves decide which issue they want to focus on and then come up with actionable ideas. Teachers mentor them to translate the ideas into implementation. Along the way, the teenagers learn how to do research, prepare and hold a presentation, organize teams, design branding and create social media content. “They learn project management with the excuse of unplastifying,” says Unplastify co-founder Augustina “Tati” Besada.
Besada first understood the scope of the plastic problem when she ran the community recycling nonprofit Sure We Can in Brooklyn, New York, in 2016 to 2017. “Recycling doesn’t work,” she recalls realizing. Taking into account “how difficult it is, how work intensive, how expensive, and why it doesn’t work at scale, it doesn’t solve the problem,” she concluded, starkly aware of the fact that less than 10 percent of the world’s plastic gets recycled.
“All these materials end up somewhere, especially in the ocean,” she states from Unplastify’s coworking space in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Besada saw the consequences firsthand. In 2018, she sailed across the Atlantic from New York to Gibraltar on a six-month journey, taking water samples along the way. The test results were devastating: “Even in the most remote corners, every single sample we took contained plastic.” The answer, she concluded, was “to tackle the problem upstream, at the source.”
