Everyone hates plastic bags. But sisters Isabel and Melati Wijse decided to do something about them in 2013, when they were just 10 and 12 years old, respectively. All it took was a history lesson on the significance of impactful leaders to inspire the sisters in their Bali schoolroom to ask, “What can we do?”

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The Wijsens created Bye Bye Plastic Bags, a campaign that has drawn enormous attention, thanks in part to the founders’ young ages. Among its projects, the NGO has launched an educational booklet about the harms of plastics to the environment, collected rubbish from rivers and formed partnerships with collectives that produce alternatives to plastic bags. Bye Bye Plastic Bags has also inspired young people around the world to form their own teams promoting its mission, with more than 50 examples from Tokyo to Tanzania. Six years into their campaign, Indonesia began instituting bans on plastic bags in several cities, including Jakarta, as of July 1.

“Every single young person can be a changemaker, but maybe not everybody knows how,” Melati Wijsen said at the 2019 World Economic Forum, introducing a new platform called Youthtopia. “The basic skills like public speaking, organisational skills, leadership skills, how to talk to your government, everything that we have learned from the last six years—come to Youthtopia to learn them.”

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