'Greta and I are proof that kids can change the world for good'

At 14, Melati Wijsen got plastic banned on the island of Bali. Now she's inspiring the next generation of teen activists, she tells Katie Strick

- Katie Strick

MELATI WIJSEN award-winning climate activist, César-nominated film star and soon-to-be-author isn't quite on a regular WhatsApp basis with Greta Thunberg, but she is certainly delighted to count the Swedish icon as one of her 76,000 followers on Instagram.

The Indonesian-Dutch 22-year-old has shared many a stage with Thunberg since she founded Bye Bye Plastic Bags NGO said to (BBPB), the youth-driven have inspired the single-use plastic ban on her home island of Bali in 2019.

Wijsen launched the initiative with her younger sister and "best friend" Isabel when they were just 12 and 10 years old, after being inspired by a lesson in school about global figures from Mahatma Gandhi to Lady Diana.

The result was an inspirational story of their own: in 2017 they threatened to go on a hunger strike over Bali's plastic pollution crisis. The governor agreed to meet them, and two years later he signed an island-wide order banning plastic bags, straws and styrofoam.

That project was to be the launchpad for a glittering changemaking career. Wijsen has since given two TED Talks and shared platforms with Thunberg everywhere from Davos to the UN headquarters in New York.

She jokes that she might not have made it into Thunberg's "inner circle" ("there are a couple of people I would call first before Greta") but she "respects and admires" everything the 20-year-old Swede is doing. "She has accelerated the youth movement to a point where it's never been before, and I think we all have a role to play in what she has done in making the climate crisis a household conversation," she tells me from her hometown on the south-west coast of Bali.