Interview with climate activist and founder Charlie Abrams
When it comes to the state of our world, we can often feel powerless. However, it is these uncertain times that can also give rise to the surge of change-makers and innovative thinkers, who contribute to shaping our world for the better.
Meet Charlie Abrams, a 17-year-old climate activist and cinematographer based in Portland, Oregon, US. Passionate about finding climate solutions, Charlie first got involved with climate activism at age nine. For the past eight years, he has worked on climate legislation, organised climate strikes and youth events in his city, and helped to establish a climate change curriculum for over 40,000 students in schools in his state, working on one of the most aggressive executive orders on climate in America. His work so far has awarded him the 2018 EcoHero Award, 2019 Point of Light Award, 2019 Gloria Barron Award, as well as being one of the top five finalists for the 2017 Children’s Climate Prize.
In light of an alarming housing problem in the city of Portland, alongside an increase in plastic pollution in his city, Charlie set out to combine both of these issues and tackle them with one common solution. He founded Recycled Living, a non-profit focused on using plastic waste to create building materials to create home communities for the homeless. We had the pleasure of talking with Charlie and discussing this exciting project and his trajectory in climate activism.
Conchita Fraguas (CF): Looking at your past work in climate action, how did you first get involved with climate activism?
Charlie Abrams (CA): When I was in fourth grade, I heard about climate change for the first time. And it was one of those things where instead of growing up with the idea of it, I had never heard of climate change before then, and hearing about it for the first time was really scary. It shocked me how I hadn’t known about it before, and I wanted to do something about it.
“I’ve gone with that sort of philosophy into any project that I’ve started… learning is the most important thing. First you need to know what you are fighting for, and that’s something that I’ve taken into every different project, from organising climate strikes, to writing about climate science and news to my latest and current project.”
The idea was to start something small, and mainly to try and get more people my age hearing about climate change. At age nine, I started a blog on climate change alongside a friend, and we would write articles about climate science and news. I had to read all of these articles about climate science to prepare each blog post. Given my age, I felt like I needed to have this background, especially when talking with adults. It was like this idea of “I really need to know this stuff” before I talk about it. And I’ve gone with that sort of philosophy into any project that I’ve started, where learning is the most important thing to do at first. You first need to know what you are fighting for, and that’s something that I’ve taken into every different project, from organising climate strikes, to writing about climate science and news to my latest and current project.
Over the next year, the blog started to take off, and we started getting interviewed about it on news and radio stations. It was through one of the radio stations that a non-profit heard about us and reached out. This was the first real experience that I had so far in climate activism. They focused on the legislative side of climate action. At age 10, I started working with them, and experienced first-hand what a real solution to climate change would look like in the state that I live in in Oregon.
CF: Having been involved from a young age, what are your thoughts on youth engagement in the legislative side of climate action?
CA: From my first experience with climate advocacy, I saw how little youth were involved at that point. On the first year when I started lobbying, [my friend and myself] would show up to The Capitol to meet with legislators and politicians and we were the only youth present. However, even though we were still quite young at the time, I had this feeling that we could contribute to what felt like a really large thing.
“I think it’s super important to be able to create a space for youth to feel welcome and want to be working on something large and tangible like climate policy. We want real solutions to these issues, we’ve grown up hearing the same things… we are looking for real solutions to these issues and policy is an effective top-down way to accomplish that.”
If you skip to a few years later to 2017, when we were down at the same Capitol working on the same policy, we had the largest amount of youth ever lobbying on a bill before, with over 200 people coming from all over Oregon to meet with legislators. I think something that was really important for this policy is that it was very youth friendly, and this made it impactful in how the policy was perceived and discussed.
I think it’s super important to be able to create a space for youth to feel welcome and want to work on something large and tangible like climate policy. We want real solutions to these issues, we’ve grown up hearing the same things, when I was in fourth grade and now that I’m going to graduate high school. We are getting tired of doing the same thing every year, we are looking for real solutions to these issues and policy is an effective top-down way to accomplish that.
CF: Climate legislation is often perceived as one of the most tangible solutions to tackle climate change. What did you learn from this experience and what this approach can help achieve?
CA: With climate policy you essentially have two types of legislation that you can be working to pass. The first one is more of a resolution, where it’s like "our goal is to reduce carbon emissions by 20% in twenty years." The second one, which is what I was working on, includes more tangible forms of policy. For 6-8 years, I was working on a carbon pricing policy in Oregon. The idea was that all of the carbon emitted from the major polluters in Oregon would get taxed, but large companies below that cap wouldn’t, and this would help to get people to over time lower their emissions. And it’s a comprehensive plan. It works well in Sweden and other countries, and we were trying to implement it in Oregon.
It felt the most top-down action was to lower Oregon’s carbon emissions. It was something tangible and was gaining a lot of support. At this point I was glad that I had been writing all of the articles about climate science for those years and had that background in climate science.
Over the past few years, Charlie’s focus has been on climate advocacy, working on different policies and facilitating climate science being taught in the curriculum in schools in his state in Oregon. Alongside these efforts, he started organising climate strikes and marches. Now he is working on his latest project, called Recycled Living, which aims to build houses for the homeless using recycled materials made out of plastic waste.
CF: Let’s talk about Recycled Living, how did this idea first come about?
CA: The idea for Recycled Living started about four years ago. In Portland at that time, homelessness was at the front of the media’s attention. We had an increase in people living without a home, and it was talked about heavily in the media. There was also an increase in plastic pollution, as a result of people being homeless and the fact that our recycling system could not process the plastic that our city was generating. Both these issues were really prevalent in the city, and in 2017 I first set out to find a connection between the two.
The idea at that point was to create building materials out of plastic and build homes for people that were homeless. It remained a drawing on a whiteboard for about three years, until 2020, when these issues became exasperated by the state that Portland was in, intensified by Covid. Adding to that, with intense weather events, there were a lot more people that were now losing their homes, and all these different things made me see what this project could do, and I started to look at this idea as a project that I might want to focus on.
"There was an increase in plastic pollution, as a result of people being homeless and the fact that our recycling system could not process the plastic that our city was generating. Both of these issues were really prevalent in Portland and in 2017 I first set out to find a connection between the two."
For about six months, I started different prototypes and concepts of this project to see [its feasibility]. I have a background in CGI and 3D animation, and this allowed me to create the concept design for the homes, the machines, and building materials in a computer before ever having the funding to create it in real life. Throughout the six to eight months, I was just trying and experimenting– buying toaster ovens and taking them apart for their heating elements to see the heating points of different plastics, it involved lots of trial and error and became a very self-taught kind of project.
I applied for a contest with a company called Vessi, and I pitched the idea of Recycled Living and they selected my project. This allowed me to obtain seed funding for the project, meaning it was finally time to take everything I had made in the computer and transfer it into the real world, and I started by making the machines needed to make this possible.
CF: What are these machines that you describe and how are they able to turn plastic waste into recycled materials to build homes?
First, I needed to build a plastic shredder, which shreds the plastic into flakes. A two-feet long open-face mould made from forty pounds of steel holds the plastics as they go into the next machine, the heating chamber. In this chamber, the plastic is heated until its malleability point is reached, which changes depending on the plastic that is used. The final machine is the compressor, which compacts the warmed malleable plastic into a final dense brick.
I spent about three months in the warehouse dedicated to working on these machines. It also happened to be during Portland’s historic heatwave, so I would have to get up at six in the morning to avoid working in excessive heat. There was a lot of [troubleshooting] involved, with heating elements burning out, acquiring donated materials, and being worried about running short on funding. I also underestimated the electronics involved in constructing the heating chamber, and a million different things. However, I am glad of all the challenges that I faced and all that I learned, it allowed me to build a background in welding, electronics and engineering which I couldn’t say I had before starting this project.
"I am glad of all the challenges that I faced and all that I learned, it allowed me to build a background in welding, electronics and engineering which I couldn’t say I had before starting this project."
I also partnered with different companies, grocery stores and local business to get the plastic to be able to make the recycled bricks, and I ended up having to tell people that I couldn’t hold anymore plastic. I didn’t realise how much plastic these companies would generate, it was insane. And after months of work, the machines where finally constructed, and the first brick was made.
Then it was onto a different aspect of the project, which involved securing funding and launching the fundraising campaign, to be able to raise enough money to construct this community and go into the next phase of this project.
CF: That’s amazing. Looking at where you are now and into the future, where do you hope to see Recycled Living going?
CA: Once the funding goal is reached, the plan is to construct the homes in Portland, and build a community for families and individuals experiencing homelessness to live in as soon as possible. Once that’s created, the idea is to expand this to other areas in the city. Because of the focus of this project in housing and plastics, which are common issues worldwide, I would like to expand the project to developing countries.
A lot of the time, in low-income coastal communities, large amounts of plastics wash up on their shores. As they are met with that coastal countries are often faced with the scarcity of housing because of natural disasters, so there is space for a lot of different things that this project could serve. Taking the plastic that's already there and transforming it in a way that can make homes, that’s something that is really exciting and to be able to grow this project to serve other places across the globe.
CF: What words would you give aspiring young activists or people wanting to engage in climate activism in their communities?
CA: I think that above anything else, if you have the passion for whatever you want to do, that’s the only thing that you need, you can figure everything out from there. That was my whole idea back in 4th grade. My friend and I had no idea where the blog was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to do something about [climate change]. And obviously it’s much more difficult than that one statement and there are often complications, but if you have the drive and the passion to do something then the rest will figure itself out.
"If you have the passion for whatever you want to do, that’s the only thing that you need... The other important thing is to focus on the learning. When you do, all the failures and setbacks don’t really feel like failures...Your goal isn’t on the success of the project but on learning through the entire journey of that process."
The other important thing is to focus on the learning. When you do, all the failures and setbacks don’t really feel like failures, because your goal isn’t on the success of the project but on learning through the entire journey of that process. I can specifically remember coming into the warehouse and turning on the heating chamber and it just not working… if my only goal had been for this machine to work, it would have been heart-breaking. But when the goal is simply to learn, you also realise that every skill is built up on top of each other, and that was a really important part of this project, focusing on the learning made Recycled Living possible.
Recycled Living is looking to grow, and has recently launched their fundraising campaign, collecting funds to move the project into a larger scale, and it currently stands at a little over 60% of the funding target gathered already.
To learn more about Recycled Living click here. You can help support Recycled Living’s latest fundraising campaign, which is live here, and help the project reach its next stage.
Interview by Conchita Fraguas
The Earth Youth Project