There can be little doubt the ranks of the myriad green extremist groups are swollen by students, but the Generation-Z cohort is the least likely to do their recycling, suggesting something of a gap between happiness to virtue signal and willingness to make change in their own lives.
Research by the packaging industry shows that while young people overwhelmingly believe they have “committed to a sustainable lifestyle”, they are also the worst at actually recycling. DS Smith states data from market research they commissioned, based on a survey of 2,000 adults in the United Kingdom, showed the best-behaved generation are actually the Baby Boomers, 54 per cent of whom say they always recycle their paper and cardboard.
Just 19 per cent of Gen-Z say they do all their recycling. Indeed, a considerable majority at 92 per cent of the adults born after 1997 “admitted to throwing something in the bin instead of recycling it because they couldn’t be bothered to clean it out,” the survey said.
As well as this disconnect between the Gen-Z self-image as sustainable with their actual habits, another contrast is the fact that age group also came out on top as the most likely to “call someone out if they see someone throwing something away that could have been recycled,” suggesting a somewhat performative aspect to professed concern about green issues among young people.
In a discouraging coincidence, the recycling research comes as two soup-chucking green extremists were jailed on Friday, Generation-Z activists who may have proven more adept at throwing soup cans than — as the research suggests could be typical for people of their age — putting them into the right recycling bin.
23-year-old Phoebe Plummer and 22-year-old Anna Holland, 22, were handed two years and 20 months respectively over their stunt where cans of tomato soup were thrown at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the London National Gallery in 2022. The pair are activists for the Just Stop Oil campaign group, and were upbraided for the judge for showing no remorse for nearly damaging the artwork, and causing £10,000 of damage to the frame.
The Guardian reports Plummer and Holland blew kisses to the public gallery before they were taken down to the cells.
That the Baby Boomer generation stand head and shoulders above Gen-Zers in recycling could be something of an uncomfortable truth to some, given the bitter anger felt by some young people against their parents and grandparents, who they blame for destroying the world. In 2022, it was reported an Extinction Rebellion leader told her fellow activists: “How about ‘euthanising’ boomers as they caused [the] problem and are such a big part of [the] population? First to go rich boomers”.
