Plastic Free July Interview with Miss Mystic Beauty - Ms Greater Manchester

Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?

I am Sintija Ribaka and your Miss Mystic Beauty-Ms Greater Manchester.

What was the reason you chose an Eco platform?

I love animals and nature and have seen so many documentaries about Earth and started questioning myself. When you think about it- animal extinction, global warming, environmental pollution, resource depletion it is all caused by us-humans. So to make a changes and turn everything in a better way, I am starting with myself first and then trying to bring my message to the world.

What eco projects have you been doing during your reign?

I am self educating myself and have created my own platform called “Be My Voice”, what is reflecting my personality and dedicated to biodiversity related topics. I am trying to give people information and be a rolemodel, for example I have swapped items to eco friendly things, growing my own vegetables, doing litter picking, recycling items, swapping transport to walking, have done conservation training, created water pollution awareness campaign “BeWaterWise”, doing “Healthy Planet Conversations” (mini interviews with people) and one of my biggest achievements is setting up “International Biodiversity Award 2021”,where being sustainable is very important.

Apart from that, things, what you can see on my social media is just a little bit of that, what I am doing. I have been working very hard on environment projects in my town and got shortlisted for “Wigan Town Award” in category “Environmental Hero”. I am very proud Wigan Council has seen my hard work and dedication and I got in top 6 in my town.

July in the U.K. is plastic free month it’s in place to highlight the harm of single use plastic and encourages people to go plastic free for the whole month. How will you be doing this in July?

Every day I am trying to be more plastic free and choose more sustainable lifestyle. This July I am doing more litter picking on land and will carry on my “BeWaterWise” awareness campaign, because every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans and water pollution is our global problem.

Why is reducing plastic use so important to you and our environment?

If we look at plastic circle, we can see, once it gets thrown away and not recycled, it comes back to us- through water resources, landfills and food supplies. Plastic threatens our health and wildlife too- entanglement, choking, ingestion that leads to poisoning and starvation and many other issues. The majority of plastic waste does not get reused or recycled and is ending up in our oceans and land. However even recyclable plastic could be a problem, because most municipal governments do not have the infrastructure in place to carry out this energy-intensive process and recycling plastic requires large amounts of energy and uses large quantities of water.

Having a plastic free awareness month is amazing but we should be doing this more, as well as other ways to help protect the environment. Can you give us your top tips on how to be eco friendly?

Watch a documentary about our planet and environment, it will get you in a thinking mood and show you a real facts and numbers. Also people usually get worried it has to be quick transition to eco friendly person, but from my experience I would say, just start with couple of small things and then add some more. Think about your lifestyle. What could you swap to environment friendly options? And another thing is to buy less and consume less. I believe many of us are collecting things and after short time putting them in a bin, creating a global amount of waste.