Wales's 'Young Hero': The teenage eco activist who's waging war on plastic pollution

October 15, 2025

Wales's 'Young Hero': The teenage eco activist who's waging war on plastic pollution

For her sixth birthday, Skye Neville asked her parents for a litter picker. Aged ten, she gave an interview to BBC Radio 4 that prompted Waitrose to stop selling children's magazines with plastic toys attached. At 12, she was in Costa Rica working as a marine plastics officer for a sea turtle conservation project, and at 14 she starred in a crusading documentary film and spoke at a press conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Last month, aged 15, she won two separate awards (on top of the three she already had) - Environmental Champion in the Child of Wales Awards and Young Hero at the BBC Wales Make a Difference Awards - for her unflagging and spirited campaigning against plastic waste.

Though she's already done more to wage war on plastic pollution than most people do in a lifetime, Skye - from Friog - has no plans to end her fight, which has inspired thousands of young people around the world to stand up for environmental change. "It's become so much a part of my life that I couldn't imagine doing anything else," she declares.

It all began when Skye moved to Gwynedd from Dorset with her parents, Hannah and Dave, when she was three. Living so close to Fairbourne, which is at risk of being lost to the sea due to climate change, sustainability issues were especially close to the family's heart.

"I've always done beach cleaning at Fairbourne with my parents, right from when I was small," she explains. "I remember I asked for a litter picker for my sixth birthday."

When she was a little older, Skye - an avid reader - would ask for magazine subscriptions as birthday presents. She clearly recalls, aged ten, receiving an issue of Horrible Histories and being struck by the amount of single-use plastic add-ons, from the wrapper to the giveaway toy. "In all, there were 16 pieces of single-use plastic, and I thought, 'that's really wrong'."

So incensed was she that Skye wrote to the publishers, Kennedy Publishing, asking them to stop issuing cheap, throwaway plastic gifts with their children's comics and magazines, but to no avail. "They replied saying, basically, that 'kids love this stuff'."

Skye's dad counselled that his young daughter could either "let it go" or do something about it and start a petition. Being a "very angry ten-year-old", she chose the second option. "Ten million pieces of plastic are given away with kids' magazines every week in the UK alone, which adds up to half a billion a year! Even worse, they're just tat: they break easily, and kids play with them maybe once and then throw them away, and because they're made from cheap plastics that aren't usually recycled, they often end up in landfill, incineration or littered in the environment. And that has an impact on the climate crisis."

Before long, the Change.org petition had garnered several thousand signatures and begun to attract media attention. One of the interviews Skye gave was to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"Afterwards, I was contacted by a senior manager of Waitrose, who'd heard me on Radio 4," she recalls. "He said he'd worked at the supermarket chain for 20 years and had never noticed how much plastic came with these magazines and comics."

As a result, Waitrose announced - just ten days later - it would stop selling children's magazines that came with plastic toys.

Meanwhile, the signatures on Skye's petition went through the roof - rocketing from about 8,000 to 55,000 in a matter of hours (it currently stands at nearly 67,000) - and Skye's activism stepped up a gear. She started working with an organisation called Common Seas, encouraging schoolchildren to write to supermarkets to ask them to reduce their plastic use.

Skye was 11 when she won her first accolade - Youth Activist in the Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) plastic-free awards - which led to her becoming an SAS regional rep and giving a 30-minute talk to a room of 100 adults at SAS headquarters. It was here that she met Jordan Gledhill from One Planet Conservation Awareness, a platform that supports conservation work and activism around the world.

"A few months later, he emailed me with an idea for a video series on the United Nations' sustainable development goals. In the email he mentioned he was managing a sea turtle conservation project, COPROT, in Costa Rica. Mum started following the project's Facebook page and saw they were looking for a marine plastics officer. Jokingly, she asked if a 12-year-old could do the job - and Jordan said yes!"

So, in November 2022, Skye - who is home-educated - flew out to Costa Rica with her mum, where she spent nearly three months living in "rustic" accommodation by the beach at the jungle's edge, organising beach cleans and turning the plastic waste they collected into bowls, plant pots and jewellery, using precious-plastic recycling machines, and selling them to raise money for COPROT.

Skye making a pot from reclaimed plastic, Costa Rica

No sooner had she returned to Wales, in February 2023, than Skye was invited to the Senedd in Cardiff to be announced as a finalist in the Welsh government's annual St David Awards, meeting then-First Minister Mark Drakeford. Two months later, she was back in the Welsh capital to be crowned winner of the Young Person category. "That was surreal, because the other two nominees in my category were incredible."

On the podium after winning her St David Award

Skye then joined forces with Kids Against Plastic (KAP) and together they relaunched Skye's campaign as KAPtat, which encourages schoolchildren to "write a wrong" by penning letters to publishers, distributors and supermarkets, demanding action against single-plastic use. "So, for example, the CEO of Tesco was sent thousands of letters over 200 days from around the UK," explains Skye. The supermarket came close to following Waitrose's lead, but in the end didn't go ahead with the ban.

"What's happened more recently, though, is that the whole children's magazine and comic industry got together, saying we'd made it very hard for them (to continue using plastic), so hopefully it means they are now listening."

And then along came a film project! Skye was chosen to feature in a documentary called Future Council, which follows Australian director Damon Gameau and seven other young climate activists from all over the globe on a road trip across Europe in a vintage yellow school bus. Their mission is to voice their fears for the future of the planet to some of the world's biggest corporations - from "really cool" people such as CEOs trying to make their companies green to "bad guys" such as banks. "We each had our own skills and areas of interest: I was the activist," says Skye, who appears in the film bravely telling the boss of Nestlé: "You're not a powerful leader; you're a disgrace."

When the documentary premiered at the Melbourne Film Festival in August last year, Skye and her dad were flown over to Australia for the event. Even amidst her excitement, however, the environmental implications of the long-haul flights didn't sit well with the teenager, so to offset the carbon footprint she did a litter pick on Fairbourne beach every day for 50 days beforehand, collecting 300 kilos of rubbish.

After a month travelling around Australia in a camper van, father and daughter prepared to fly home to Wales - but then came the call for Skye to attend a Future Council screening in New York as part of the UN's Summit of the Future, where the teenager and the rest of the film group gave a press conference at the General Assembly.

Skye and the rest of the Future Council cast at the UN in New York

"One of the my favourite memories is going to an event at the Ford Foundation before travelling to Times Square in a VIP tuk-tuk, with music blasting away," says Skye. "It was crazy!"

After limited screenings in the UK this autumn, a UK-European tour of Future Council is planned for early next year, before the film goes on general release.

The documentary has already led to more than 100 young people worldwide forming their own councils to collaborate on environmental solutions and advise businesses on sustainable practices. "Future Council isn't just a film, it's a movement," explains Skye.

Away from activism, Skye is a diligent learner - she's already passed six GCSEs with A or A* grades - and a keen and accomplished yachtswoman, having learned to sail at Dyfi Yacht Club (DYC) in Aberdyfi when she was nine. Earlier this year she joined the Tall Ships Youth Trust, based in Portsmouth, where she's a volunteer trainee watch leader. When she turns 16 she hopes to become a dinghy instructor at DYC.

Meanwhile, she's been toying with going to college to study A Levels, but is reluctant to give up the flexibility of home education. "Jordan, who ran the Costa Rica sea-turtle project, is keen to set up a similar project on an island in Malaysia next year, so I might get to study for a mine science A Level out there," enthuses Skye.

So does the 15-year-old, whose ambition is to skipper a Greenpeace ship, feel that all her hard work has made a difference in the battle against climate change?

"It's such a huge problem and there are so many aspects to it - which is why I've just concentrated on plastic - but the things I've been involved with have inspired other young people to try to make a difference, so that makes it worthwhile. After Waitrose banned magazines with plastic toys, I could have stopped then, but I carried on, and as a result all these amazing opportunities have come up - and that's so cool."