After class, a woman rebuilds her life with trash collected at the edge of a polluted river | Look how cute it is

A little over a year after being surprised by the colorful plastic she collected as part of a river cleanup, the 34-year-old sells thousands of decorated greeting cards each week.

When I moved to Beckham in southeast London, I sent a few cards decorated with plastic to locals offering help if they were staying at home to prevent Covid-19 contamination.

“All the first cards are done,” she said. “Some of my neighbors said they were great. You have to start selling them,” she told Reuters news agency.

She’s now working on the cards with a part-time job at a company that sells packages made of seaweed, which she acquired after being put on temporary leave, then fired from a company that was making junk fruit and vegetable sauces.

Majoring in geography, she has no formal technical training, but she enjoys being outside and finding new possibilities in old studs or plastic straws while cleaning riverbanks for a local environmental charity.

She now produces hundreds of cards a week, although in May it made thousands of cards to meet a surge in orders after her story appeared in British media.

She sees her success as part of a larger movement.

“I think the future is people doing things and starting businesses that don’t have the same amount of environmental impact, whether that’s reusing something or making something out of trash,” she said.