These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.
Ulwiana Mehta-Malhotra keeps clothing out of landfills and helps students stay hopeful. This 18-year-old from North Vancouver inspires highschool students to trade fast fashion for thrift shops and clothes swaps, and provides a newsletter that spreads good news about climate solutions.
Tell us about your projects.
Climate Conscious helps students understand the good they can do by resisting purchasing new clothes and donating what they don’t wear or need. Most of us in Canada have too many clothes. Globally, 85 per cent of all textiles go into landfills each year. Once students learn, there are easy ways to reduce the environmental damage caused by fast fashion, they often want to help.
I also help run Hope4Climate, providing middle and highschool students with good news stories about the environment and making it easy to add their own.
How did you get into these projects?
During the pandemic, I noticed how much food our household diverted from the landfill by composting, but realized we didn’t do it at school. When the lockdown ended, I started my middle school’s first classroom composting program. This got me thinking about other waste.
I attended a talk by a speaker from Family Services North Vancouver who said they needed clothes for teenagers. I looked for reasons to persuade my fellow students to donate their gently-used clothing and learned about the environmental damage from fast fashion. The combination of meeting immediate needs and helping with a global problem resonated with many, and we filled 20 boxes just from my own school! I gave talks to students in environmental clubs and assemblies in 15 other schools and built a website to spread the information. Hundreds of boxes of clothes have been kept out of the landfill and many young people in our community have more of their clothing needs met.
As I was working with my friends on this project, I noticed how anxious so many were about their futures in the changing climate. When I attended a conference about the clothing project, I met University of Victoria Professor Elin Kelsey, who wrote Hope Matters. I helped her build Hope 4 Climate to encourage students to be hopeful about climate change mitigation.
What makes your work hard?
Breaking through the apathy everywhere is challenging. But just as the speaker from Family Services North Vancouver could not have known that she would spark this in me, I never know what my work will ignite in others.
What keeps you awake at night?
I don’t understand how decision-makers can act so slowly when environmental degradation is so apparent. I suppose you could deny that climate change created the fires in Los Angeles or the hurricane in South Carolina, or made the heat dome in British Columbia worse or more likely, but everyone can see the coral reefs are dying and humans are cutting irreplaceable old-growth forests.
What gives you hope?
When I first got active in the senior school sustainability club, there were only four kids. Now, there are more than 30. If I focus on what the people around me are doing and look for the positive environmental efforts out there, even if it's not in the news, I stay hopeful.
When my friends and I make things better for people close to home, as well as slowing environmental damage and climate change, we feel better.
What do you see if we get this right?
Students, teachers, economists, politicians, corporate decision-makers — everyone — evaluates their decisions based on how they impact each other and the environment.
How did the way you were raised affect where you are today?
My parents are first-generation immigrants from India. They taught us to think about the impact of our actions, and to reuse and repurpose items. We preferred homemade Christmas gifts, understanding that the effort making them was as much a treasure as the gift itself.
What's next for you?
I am at university studying economics with a multidisciplinary focus. I want to understand the connections between the economy and the environment and how to repair them.
What would you like to say to other young people?
Bring your passions to climate change action. I set up an art installation at school to reach students who are visual learners, telling the story of some of the impacts of fast fashion with items like rusted sewing machines, plastic clothes and children’s shoes. Other students, who were interested in film, made it into a documentary. We reached many more than I could have with just words or facts alone.
What about older readers?
We have a lot to learn from your experience and maybe you can understand our fears and hopes. Working intergenerationally is rewarding if we can learn from each other.
Comments
My favourite colour is purple. This has given me trouble in the matter of shirts, because purple shirts are damn hard to find. So in the end, what I do is buy purple fabric, take it to a tailor, and have him make shirts out of it. This is kind of expensive in the short term, although the old Chinese guy who made the first shirts I did this way made them amazingly cheaply. But in the long run it pays off . . . some of my shirts are 30 years old, shirts I've regularly worn around once a week through that whole time. And they fit really well, and I picked the style. And I know there are no sweatshops involved--rather, there's a guy with a shop who I talk to personally. If it weren't for my unusual tastes I would never have thought of doing things this way, but I heartily recommend it.