An Australian man has spent three days camped on top of a giant pyramid

of rubbish in Egypt to highlight the environmental problem posed by single-

use plastics.

The 10m high, 12m wide waste pyramid is made of one million plastic
bottles scooped up from Egypt’s famous Nile River.

The pyramid was built in the Egyptian desert over five days by Aussie zero
waste company Zero Co, environmental group VeryNile and Egyptian artist
Bahia Shehab on the eve of the COP27 climate talks in Egypt.

The pyramid contains one million plastic bottles that were removed from the Nile River and its banks.

Zero Co founder Mike Smith camped on top of the pyramid, which contains
18,000kg of plastic waste, to raise awareness about single-use plastics and
to launch 100yr Cleanup, a plan to host large rubbish clean-ups around the
world over the next 100 years.

Mr Smith hopes the waste pyramid stunt* will encourage individuals and
businesses to sponsor bundles of rubbish to fund the 100yr Cleanup project.
“We want to put the plastic problem on the environmental agenda*,” Mr
Smith said. “We know we can’t do this alone, so we need to get everyone
involved.

“By working together with businesses, industry leaders and inviting the
public to take direct action, we’ll be able to build a scalable* solution to the
problem and have a huge impact.”

Some of the one million plastic bottles that were used to build the giant plastic waste pyramid.

Zero Co, which is campaigning* to stop single-use plastic production and

turns this waste into environmentally friendly packaging, aims to raise $1
million for the 100yr Cleanup project over the next year, resulting in the
removal of 15 million water bottles worth of rubbish.

An underwater clean-up in Australia and a clean-up in the Himalayas, “the

roof of the world”, are among the project’s targets for next year.

The waste pyramid was built as leaders from 125 nations prepared to gather
in Egypt for the 27th Conference of the Parties, or COP27. The two-week
climate change summit*, run by the United Nations, started on November 6.
Zero Co founder Mike Smith helps fish out plastic bottles from Egypt’s famous Nile River.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation launched its annual State of

the Global Climate report on the first day of the summit, painting an
alarming picture of global warming.

The report found Earth’s warming weather and rising seas were getting
worse and doing so faster than at any other time since record keeping began.

“The latest State of the Global Climate report is a chronicle* of climate

chaos,” warned United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres.

“We must answer the planet’s distress signal with action: ambitious*,
credible climate action.”

The report found that sea level rise in the past decade was double what it
was in the 1990s, and since January 2020 had jumped at a higher rate than
that. Since the decade began, seas have been rising at 5mm a year,
compared to 2.1mm a year in the 1990s.

The report also found the past eight years had been the warmest on record.
It found that concentrations* of the three main greenhouse gases* – carbon
dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – reached record highs in 2021.

These gases trap solar radiation* and warm the Earth’s surface. Higher
temperatures are linked to more and increasingly severe droughts, intense
rainfall, floods and storms, according to climate scientists working for the
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.