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 climate activist icon as one of her 76,000 followers on Instagram.
The Indonesian-Dutch 22-year-old has shared many a global stage with Thunberg over the years since she founded Bye Bye Plastic Bags (BBPB), the youth-driven NGO that is said to have inspired the single-use plastic ban on her home island of Bali in 2019. Wijsen launched the intiative 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 celebrated global figures from Princess Diana to Mahatma Gandhi. The result was an inspirational story of their own: in 2017 they threatened to go on a hunger strike over their island’s plastic pollution crisis; the governor of Bali agreed to meet them; and two years later he signed an order banning plastic bags, straws and styrofoam island-wide.
