Teenager helps plants grow - with tea and coffee

For everyone in the world to have enough to eat, we need to grow more, but also to waste less of what we already grow. Eiman has come up with a way that could help us do both – grow more and waste less.

An elephant’s weight in tea!

Eiman loves tea. And coffee.  But every cup made her a little sad. These tea leaves, or coffee beans, had come a long way. And now, she was throwing them in the bin. So Eiman started putting old tea leaves around her plants.

Roses love it, she found! Eiman started collecting waste from cafes. Now lots of people help, collecting five and a half tonnes in the last couple of years! That’s as much as the weight of an elephant!

Most now goes to plant nurseries. Eiman is making Lahore bloom.

Nature’svown fertiliser

Fitting all that in with school work wasn’t easy. Eiman says the hardest part was getting the organisation started to collect the waste from cafes and homes and deliver it to plant growers.

Now she hopes her idea, recycling food waste into organic fertiliser, can help people grow more food around the world without damaging the soil with chemicals.

The most fun part of the project for Eiman has been seeing people of all ages working together, including children who really want to help the environment.

Look around you!

She says kids who wish tochange the world should start by looking for small things around them that theycould fix – like her with her tea leaves: “As kids,” says Eiman, “We need todiscover what we’re passionate about and what we want to make change for.”

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