Addison Road and TAFE

Addi Road

The Plastic Free Future Project is a community-led initiative that runs fun and creative activities for local bilingual communities. Through regular meetings and artist-led workshops, the project uses art and story to support the move away from single-use plastics, and is supported by the Addison Road Community Centre and TAFE NSW.

Community educators held information sessions with people from specific cultural groups. These sessions informed not only in language, but in a culturally impactful and relevant way. They also delivered creative workshops such as soap-making sessions, photography and visual art, and crochet classes. These activities were a way to engage further with community, sparking conversation, creating meaningful connections, and instilling new skills all while encouraging behaviour-change around the use of single-use plastics.

The items produced through the creative workshops were showcased in an art exhibition titled “Yalla Bye Plastic”, an ode to the Arabic-English expression, widely known across communities.

Feedback from one of the sessions gave some insight into community views about the plastic bans and identified shifts in attitudes after the workshop. For example, women in the workshop questioned why there was a plastic ban at all, and why they now had to pay for plastic. After the educator gave them information from the EPA website, especially about plastic pollution in our shared waterways and the ocean, shifted in the space of one workshop. The impact was not only immediate for participants but is ongoing and expansive, as women are key educators and consumers within their families and the broader community.