An animated series on YouTube seeks to educate younger Filipinos about being more environmentally conscious as the country deals with a plastic pollution crisis.
Animated YouTube channel “Miming and Friends” partnered with snacks company Mondelez Philippines to create content about home waste management in a bid to teach kids and their families.
Providing knowledge in the video series is the environmental organization Save Philippine Seas (SPS), which aims to empower people towards ecological consciousness and lead them to collective action and behavior change.
It launched its first episode about the importance of waste segregation last year, where the characters of Miming, Buboy, and Anacorn meet a new friend who teaches them about sorting trash.
“The first episode of our partnership launched last year was about waste segregation. Proper waste segregation increases the chances of materials finding their way to their own recycling streams,” SPS executive director and “Chief Mermaid” Anna Opos said.
“While there is much to be developed, we have a growing recycling industry here in the Philippines. This episode aims to encourage us all to find partners in our communities, from individual waste collectors to junk shops, and work with them to ensure our waste does not end up in oceans,” she added.
The series’ second episode continues the learnings by expounding on the process of recycling, particularly how plastics are recycled.
In it, the characters of Miming, Buboy, Anacorn, and Darling the Dugong meet a new friend who explains what they can do with plastic waste.
The episode aims to help kids understand how they can make an impact and for families to know how else their plastic waste can be recycled in their communities.
“Miming and Friends” is led by the characters of Cat-Fish Miming, flying lizard Buboy, and Unicorn Anacorn.
Their video topics include values, how to count and sing, and the importance of caring for each other and the environment — all from the multilingual and multicultural perspective of the Filipino experience.
The channel is the creation of Miming and Fwends Animation Studios, formed by partners Ramon and Meryll del Prado from Dumaguete, Negros Oriental.
Meanwhile, the campaign is one of the ways Mondelez complies with the Extended Producer Responsibility on Plastic Packaging Waste Law or Republic Act 11898.
The newly-passed law establishes a national policy on adopting a systemic, comprehensive, and ecological solid waste management program.
Among other provisions, identified companies such as Mondelez are required to retrieve and divert 20% of their total plastic output starting this year.
An environmental news and data platform recently reported that plastic pollution remains one of the Philippines’ “biggest” environmental issues, saying it is “a particularly severe problem.”
“Evident by the World Bank’s use of the word ‘staggering’ to describe the situation in the Philippines, an insufficient waste management system, coupled with a high dependence on single-use plastics set the scene for the country’s annual generation of 2.7 million tons of plastic waste,” Earth.org said last January.
“Much like any rapidly developing country, the Philippines faces unsustainable plastic consumption due to an inefficient recycling system. Estimates show that the country loses around US$890 million to unrecycled plastic products,” it added.
