Sainath Manikandan once read a story about the famous environmentalist, Dr. Jane Goodall. She’d helped him to see that no matter how small a step might seem, the tiniest effort can eventually make a huge difference. He was just a young boy in school, but he had paid attention when she said that it didn’t matter how old someone was; what mattered was the action they took to move the world in the right direction. So Sainath decided to start where he would be able to make a change—in his own school. He’d seen that a lot of his classmates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) used single-use plastics in their everyday lives. He found this extremely concerning. He’d first noticed the impact of single-use plastics when he had visited his family’s hometown in India when he was 8 years old. Sainath was bothered enough by this that when he got home, he did some research. “This is a problem all over the world,” he says. “An estimated amount of eight million tons of plastic ends up in the world’s oceans every year.” If that continues, it is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than there is marine wildlife. These shocking numbers made Sainath wonder what he could do about it.