Anya Yang
2025 Youth Climate Activism Award - Essay Entry
Anya is a 17 year old from Ontario.
IdeAction and YCAA
When I was 15 years old, I watched a Business Insider video on Julie Church, an environmental conservationist who, after visiting the Kenyan coastline in 1997, discovered many discarded flip-flops washed up on the ocean shore. She realised that though over 1 billion are made per year and thrown away quickly as they are easily worn out, they often end up in oceans and are mistaken as food by marine animals. Realising they also were not recyclable and that this was a problem all across the world, she saw local children making different toys out of the discarded flip-flops washed on the ocean shore.
Ocean Sole Elephant sculpture courtesy of the Ocean Sole website.
This inspired her to create Ocean Sole, an organisation dedicated to recycling foam flip flops into colourful sculptures by Kenyan artists.
Her story inspired me. Unlike her, Iβd never visited Africa. However, like her, I saw waste in the world first-hand.
*Photo of Anya courtesy Youth Leaders of York Region
As an avid badminton player for the past 8 years, Iβd seen many birdies too broken or ruffled or broken, making it unbalanced, and thus thrown away. After doing some research, I found that they were made of feathers, cork, leather, plastic, rubber, and glue, to name a few β at least, for the feathered ones. The synthetic kind is comprised of cork, rubber, and nylon. Neither type decomposes easily, and if decomposed, it leaves microplastics in the environment that often prove to be harmful. And since one player, out of 339 million worldwide, uses dozens at a time to train or play, a LOT of birdies go to waste.
So, inspired by Ocean Sole, we at BirdieUP are an NPO that makes birdies into purchasable art: birdie keychains. Attached are donated art materials, put together skillfully by our different volunteers. We then sell them to donate the funds to the Worldwide Wildlife Fund.
Images from posts on BirdieUp IG
Images from BirdieUp Canada for making keychains from Birdies
Weβve had a couple of bumps on the road since our starting date in October 2024. We switched from braided strings to roses and Taylor Swift birdie keychains. Weβve more than doubled the price from 3 CAD to 6-10 CAD, making around 30 CAD in revenue in the first 3 months to over 325 CAD in the last 4 months. We went from just my friend and I working in my basement to dozens of volunteers helping us. We went from selling door-to-door to at different houses to preparing to sell at different workshops and events.
Our goal isnβt just to help the environment: itβs to uplift the youth around us with opportunities to express themselves, to develop organization skills by creating community events and business skills, to sell keychains and track donations. As youth are the forefront of the environmental movement, we want to provide them skills to empower themselves by helping the communities around them.
At BirdieUP, we believe that we donβt have to choose between badminton, the sport we love, and taking care of the environment. We can choose to help as many people as possible, thus making the world a better place.
The sparkly version of the Rose Birdie.
β At BirdieUP, we believe that we donβt have to choose between badminton, the sport we love, and taking care of the environment. We can choose to help as many people as possible, thus making the world a better place.β
~Anya Yang
As part of the submissions application we asked participants to answer these 3 questions in addition to their essay or video.
What future goals do you have around your environmental and climate work, and do you have any future projects in mind?
BirdieUP is currently in our most early stages of development. We have big goals for the future. Currently, we have a dozen volunteers, which we plan to turn to 100 by the end of the year. We have also raised over 300 CAD, sold 60 birdies, and we want to raise more than 1000 CAD, selling over 200 birdies. Since we also plan to expand in our community by holding at least 5 workshops at different youth centres, such as 360 Kids, and more.
We are also planning on collaborating with a professor of environmental studies to see how badminton birdies biodegrade in real life. No academic articles cite the biodegradability of badminton birdies despite the presence of components like plastic and nylon, so weβd like to see how damaging they are. Specifically, weβd like to see how the feathers (which we cut off to make keychains) can biodegrade as we do not currently have a method to recycle them. We are also in the process of making a YouTube Channel with birdie keychain tutorials.
Overall, our goal is to keep expanding and spreading our message to reach as many people, as well as raise as much money as possible.
If you could share one message of hope for your community, what would it be? Briefly explain why you would choose this message.
Iβve noticed that we often see the world around us and feel discouraged. The economy is getting worse and worse. Forests that have been alive for hundreds of years are being chopped down. It seems no matter what we do, things just seem to keep getting worse.
However, these times force us to adapt, innovate, and evolve. These times give us unique chances to look at what we are currently doing and our priorities, paving the way for positive transformation. Thus, these times are the most crucial to making change. In our case, we believe if we banded together and made small changes to our everyday lives to help the environment, we would help as much as possible. Similarly, this is our mission at BirdieUP: for everyone to pitch in, donate their time, old birdies, or money, each playing a role in making the world a better place.
Who or what inspires you to work on climate change?
The company Liquid Death encourages, and inspires me to work on climate change.
It is a canned water company that offers a range of water in recyclable aluminium cans. With cool drawings, and an outrageous name that has people wondering what it is, Liquid Death realized that oneβs brand is oneβs receptionβ in this case, branding water like energy drinks. Not only helping individuals to break their caffeine and soda dependence, their usage of aluminium is more sustainable than plastic as they can be recycled infinitely without losing quality. They have made sustainability cool.
As the founder of BirdieUP, this is my goal. There is a stereotype that environmentally friendly products arenβt as good quality or simply less convenient, and I wanted to move away from this.
Though we first used simple string keychains, no one was interested, so we pivoted. Knowing people mainly focused on aesthetics when buying keychains, we strived to use what we had and make it as beautiful as possible. We added ribbon roses, Taylor Swift themes, and more. We have a long way to go, but companies like Liquid Death, with amazing marketing that capture consumers' interest, encourage me to work harder on climate change.