Back when Prince William and Prince Harry were young lads, their father Prince Charles instilled an unusual, but sweet, habit in them. It all started when the older royal took the boys to pick up garbage while on school break. That tradition between father and sons led to a lifelong habit of picking up garbage off the streets for the young princes.
Whenever Prince Harry or Prince William see litter on the ground, they can’t help but pick it up. Speaking with the BBC as part of Prince Charles’ 70th birthday celebration, Prince William recalled the way his father normalized this environmentally-friendly practice. “We were there with our spikes, stabbing the rubbish into black plastic bags. We both just thought: ‘Oh well this is perfectly normal, everyone must do it.'”
As the brothers spoke, footage of Prince Charles’ 1970 speech warning against the dangers of plastic waste played in the background. Clearly, the harmful effects of litter has long been an interest of the Prince of Wales, which then trickled down to his sons. The environmental lesson also had quite an effect on Prince Harry.
Even as a schoolboy, Prince Harry couldn’t help but stop to pick up trash, even if it meant teasing from his classmates. “I used to get taken the mickey out of at school for just picking up rubbish,” the Duke of Sussex admitted. “I didn’t go out consciously looking for it. If you go for a walk somewhere and see something and it stands out, you pick it up.”
The brothers praised their father for instilling this virtue in them at a young age. Prince Harry was impressed that Prince Charles was able to ease them into this routine “without telling us what we should be doing.” Prince Charles led by example, which was all the more impactful for his sons. “You realize, I’ve literally done this because I am programmed to do it because my father did it and actually we should all be doing it,” said Prince Harry. Prince William agreed, adding that their father “does live the way he advocates.”
Tabloids are always going after the royals with false reports. Just this month, Woman’s Day published a story claiming Prince Charles had banished Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle from the royal family. Gossip Cop was easily able to debunk this story after just a bit of research into royal protocols. Prince Charles is not the head of the royal family, as the article implied. Rather any decisions of that magnitude would come from Queen Elizabeth.
Though Prince Harry and his wife have been heavily featured in recent tabloids, but they’re not the only targets of the media. In 2018, New Idea reported that Prince William and Kate Middleton had forbidden Prince Charles and his wife Camilla seeing from Prince Louis. The tabloid claimed the younger royals were offended that Prince Charles and Camilla had neglected to send flowers or a not to celebrate their youngest child’s birth. Gossip Cop detected a problem with that story: Prince Charles and Camilla had already met their new grandchild. There goes the publication’s claims that the older couple had been “blacklisted” from meeting the baby.