Young resident saving the planet with paper bags

He's only ten but Abdul Muqeet Mannan is already winning awards for trying to rid his neighbourhood in Abu Dhabi of plastic bags. Zenifer Khaleel interviews the ‘paper bag boy'

Abdul Muqeet remembers the date: February 2, 2010. He was eight and in grade three at St Joseph's School, Abu Dhabi, when his teacher told him and his classmates that they were introducing a ‘No plastic day'.

She gave the pupils a short talk on the importance of preserving the planet for the future and how plastic, one of the biggest threats to the environment, was polluting the earth and causing untold damage.

Back home he asked his mother, Andaleeb Mannan, more about plastic. She reiterated that it was a major pollutant that apart from taking hundreds of years to degrade, could also end up in the waterways and pose a threat to marine life. Plastic is also a major threat to animals such as camels, which have died after ingesting it. So we should reduce or discontinue our usage of plastic bags, she told him.

"But," Abdul asked, confused, "how will the grocery deliver my chocolates if they can't use plastic bags?" His mother laughed and replied that maybe they could use bags made of some other material. That set him thinking. Abdul began looking around for substitutes and the first thing that caught his eye was a pile of newspapers lying on the table.

"I thought, ‘Why can't paper be used to pack stuff?"' he says. "I wondered why I didn't think about it before." Getting down to work, he grabbed a few sheets of paper, some glue and began making paper bags.

"Initially, I could make bags which could hold a reasonable amount of stuff or weight," he recalls. But the little boy, who beat 22,000 people from 62 countries to be one of the ten winners of the Abu Dhabi Awards, persevered until he mastered the art. "I went on the internet and looked for sites which would tell me how to make them," he says.

"I made about 20 bags and the next day after school went to the grocery store near my house and asked the man at the counter if he would consider using my bags to pack stuff," he says.

"The shopkeepers were initially sceptical," recalls his mother. "But they agreed to use his bags just to humour him."

What they weren't prepared for was his persistence. The next day Abdul was back with more bags. "I'll get you more as soon as you are through with these," he told the owner.