170 million people are doing this, have you heard of it yet?

by Fayrouz on 04/07/2026 No comments

Every July, a global movement takes over kitchens, cafes, schools, and offices in 190 countries. The challenge is simple: refuse single-use plastic for one month. The impact, it turns out, is anything but small.

That is the idea behind Plastic Free July, a global movement that has grown into one of the most widely recognised environmental campaigns in the world, and if you have never heard of it before, this is your introduction.

Where it started

Plastic Free July began in 2011 with one woman in Western Australia. Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, who had spent years working in waste management, had grown concerned about the sheer volume of plastic heading into landfill. So she asked forty of her friends to try something simple: avoid single-use plastic for the month of July.

Forty became four hundred, four hundred became four thousand and more. In 2017, the Plastic Free Foundation was registered as an Australian charity to support what had clearly outgrown a grassroots experiment.

Rebecca herself has spent over three decades working in environmental management, waste reduction, and behaviour change, and has taken part in plastic pollution research expeditions across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. She co-authored a book on the movement she built and in 2023 was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to conservation. But she still describes the work in simple terms: changing our relationship with plastic, one choice at a time.

The idea is simple

Photo credit: Plastic Free July – Pawai Bebas Plastik, Indonesia

For one month, you commit to avoiding single-use plastics. The things we are handed on a daily basis, like the cups, plastic bags, straws, sachets, and cutlery that get thrown away after one meal. Once you start noticing them, you can choose differently.

You also get to decide your own level of commitment: Plastic Free July does not ask everyone to go zero waste overnight. Some people take on the full challenge, avoiding all single-use plastic across the whole month and others can start with what the campaign calls the “Big 4” or plastic bags, disposable coffee cups, plastic straws, and plastic water bottles. Both approaches are valid.

The point in this campaign is not perfection, but attention. When you start looking for plastic, you see it everywhere – and that is the beginning of doing something about it.

Why July, specifically?

There is nothing special about July as the month itself is not magic! But having a shared, fixed moment in the calendar creates collective momentum.

When millions of people are trying the same thing at the same time, the conversation spreads naturally. Colleagues challenge each other, families compare notes, cafes put signs on their counters, schools run campaigns, communities organise events which make individual action start to look, and feel, like something much bigger than one person making a swap.

A full month allows for discoveries – that your local coffee shop is happy for you to bring a reusable cup or there is a bulk store near your work. These discoveries tend to stick, making the habits formed often outlast the month itself.

What you can actually do

Photo credit: Plastic Free July – Party Kit Network; The Ballina Library Reusable Party Kit

Taking part in Plastic Free July is free. You go to the Plastic Free July website, make your pledge, and decide what level you are committing to. From there, the campaign gives you a huge range of practical ideas and resources, from swaps for your kitchen, tips for eating out, guides for workplaces, toolkits for schools, to the countless ideas for running community events.

Some of the most common starting points include bringing a reusable bag every time you shop, carrying a water bottle so you never need to buy a plastic one, choosing loose produce over wrapped, and saying no to a straw before one lands in your drink. None of them require a special shop or a significant budget.

Why single-use plastic, specifically?

Trash Hero Yogyakarta

Of all the plastics in the world, why does Plastic Free July focus on single-use items?

Because single-use plastic is the most visible, the most avoidable, and the most absurd part of the crisis. As filmmaker Jeb Berrier put it: “Why would you make something that you’re going to use for a few minutes out of a material that’s basically going to last forever, and then just throw it away? What’s up with that?”

A plastic straw is used for approximately twenty minutes, a plastic water bottle for perhaps an hour, a plastic bag often for less time than it takes to walk home from the shop, and yet all of them will outlast every person alive today. They will break into smaller and smaller toxic pieces, entering soil, water, food chains, and bodies. They will turn up in the stomachs of sea turtles, in the lungs of birds, and increasingly in human blood, breast milk, and placentas. Their production – from fossil fuels – is accelerating climate breakdown and destroying entire communities and ecosystems.

At Trash Hero cleanups every single week the same items turn up again and again: plastic bottles, sachets, straws, bags, food packaging. In 2025 alone, our volunteers collected 115.2 metric tons of waste across 2,074 cleanups, and single-use plastic made up the overwhelming majority of it. You can read the full picture in our 2025 Annual Report.

Every bottle and wrapper we pick up tells the same story: something used briefly, then left behind for someone else to deal with, often decades or centuries later. Single-use plastic is not a convenience. It is a cost that gets pushed onto the environment, onto communities without the infrastructure to deal with it, and onto future generations who never asked for it.

What about the bigger picture?

Photo credit: Plastic Free July – bRU Coffee

We know that individual action alone cannot solve a system-level problem, and the Plastic Free July campaign does not pretend otherwise. The companies producing billions of single-use plastic items each year carry responsibility that no amount of personal reusable cups can fully offset.

But individual awareness is where systemic pressure often begins. When enough people start asking why their salad comes in a single-use plastic container, or why their shampoo cannot be bought in a refillable bottle, those questions eventually reach the people with the power to answer them differently. Consumer behaviour sends signals, campaigns create visibility, visibility creates pressure, and pressure, over time, changes what gets made and how it gets sold.

Plastic Free July sits at that junction between personal habit and public accountability. It does not ask you to fix the system on your own, but it asks you to be part of the culture shift that makes fixing the system more likely.

What this means for Trash Hero

Trash Hero Gili Meno

At Trash Hero, we start by cleaning up the plastic that is already in the environment. We also know, better than most, that cleaning up is not the answer on its own. The plastic keeps coming because production keeps going, and because communities around the world are left to manage waste that was never designed to be managed safely.

Plastic Free July connects to our year-round work on behaviour change. Every piece of single-use plastic refused in July is one less piece that ends up on a beach, in a river, or in a landfill fire. Every person who takes the challenge can carry that habit into August, September, and beyond. Every conversation the campaign starts is a conversation about what we are actually producing, why, and whether there is a better way.

This July, we are encouraging our community to do both: clean up what is there, and cut down on what is coming. Join a Trash Hero cleanup near you, and take the Plastic Free July challenge while you are at it.

Because the plastic crisis is not going to be cleaned away. It needs to stop being made in the first place.

How to get started

Taking part is free and takes about two minutes to set up. Head to plasticfreejuly.org, make your pledge, and choose your level. The website is full of practical ideas for every context: at home, at work, at school, at events, and in your community.

If you want to go further, share the challenge with someone else. The campaign is always more powerful when it is something people do together rather than alone.

More to explore this Plastic Free July

Break Free From Plastic’s Asia-Pacific network is running their #FalseSolutionsExposed campaign throughout Plastic Free July, exposing the harms of plastic pollution, debunking false solutions like waste-to-energy and incineration, and celebrating real solutions like reuse and zero waste.

The campaign includes a free weekly webinar series, covering everything from building plastic-free campuses to the stories of women waste workers on the frontlines of toxic exposure.

Beyond the beach: How Trash Hero chapters are changing their communities

by Fayrouz on 21/05/2026 No comments

When most people think of Trash Hero, they picture volunteers on a beach, bags in hand, collecting what the tide and the streets have left behind. And yes, that is where it all started, and where it still shows up every single week, in communities across the world.

But the weekly cleanup has always been more than a cleanup; it is a gathering point and a starting place, and for many Trash Hero chapters, it is where the question gets asked: what else can we do?

The stories below come from chapters in many regions; they are different in scale, in method, and in context, but they share the same instinct: that real change happens in communities, built slowly, by people who show up.

Your favourite supermarket was audited, it didn’t do great

Trash Hero chapters in multiple countries took part in a first-of-its-kind pilot project to audit supermarket packaging practices worldwide. The project from Break Free From Plastic, follows on from their successful six year brand audit campaign. This time, the spotlight is being turned on supermarket chains and their significant role in plastic pollution. Trash Hero volunteers in Thailand, Malaysia, Switzerland and the UK supplied 35 audits for the report, which shows most stores are ignoring easy measures to reduce waste.

Growing farmers’ income with waste

Trash Hero Bayan in Lombok, Indonesia engaged local cashew nut farmers in a community composting project. Over several months, the team taught them how to separate and compost their food scraps using simple methods. The farmers were able to improve soil quality, grow healthier cashew trees, and nearly double the value of their harvest. To date 30 households and 40 farmers have joined the project, and village chiefs have expressed interest in making this type of food waste management mandatory in the district.

The Big Plastic Count, Swiss edition

Trash Hero Switzerland took part in the country’s first ever Big Plastic Count. The citizen science campaign that started in 2022 in the UK asks people to record the number of plastic items they throw away during one week. 11,586 people in Switzerland took part, logging 215,463 pieces of plastic. The resulting report highlighted that 95% of this waste was burned or exported and called for more investment in reusable packaging and refill infrastructure.

Reuse fit for a king

Trash Hero Chumphon took their reusable tableware to a Street Art Festival in the city. It was used to cater for more than 1,000 workers and visitors who came to see the new mural honouring the late King Bhumibol – all without single-use plastic. The team’s “community tableware bank” has been lending reusable cups, cutlery and dishes to event organisers free of charge for the last 4.5 years. In 2025, it was used at seven events in total, avoiding an estimated 23,350 pieces of single-use plastic, and strengthening the case for all types of gatherings to be zero waste.

All aboard for a lesson on waste

Trash Hero Lübeck in Germany held a two-hour workshop on cigarette butts in an unusual venue – on board the historic Fehmarnbelt, a floating lighthouse on the Untertrave river. Participants learned about the toxicity of plastic filters and their impact on soil and water when they are discarded. At the end, they were also treated to a special tour of the boat from Captain Holger!

Think global, act local

Trash Hero Ende were invited by the local government to give input at their “100 days of strategy” meeting. The volunteers shared their insights into the root causes of waste with the Regent and Vice Regent, highlighting the need for waste separation and urging strict regulation of illegal dumping, burning and single-use plastic. Enforcement was a key issue and Trash Hero supported the Regent’s call for better application of the Environment Agency’s existing rules, with education and community engagement.

Change this big rarely starts with a grand plan. More often it starts with a small group of people who care, a problem they can see right in front of them, and the decision to do something about it. That is what Trash Hero has always been at its heart. Not a campaign or a movement with a grand manifesto, but neighbours showing up for each other, week after week, in ways big and small.

This is just a small window into what our chapters have been up to this year. There are many more stories like these in our latest Annual Report, from communities all over the world.

If something in these stories felt familiar, or made you wish you had something like it where you live, come find us or your nearest chapter, and if there is not one near you yet, well, that is exactly how every single one of these stories began.

April 2026 : Environment news round-up

by Fayrouz on 30/04/2026 No comments

Our round-up of the month’s most important stories.

56 countries meet in Colombia to plan the end of fossil fuels

For the first time, 56 governments gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia to begin planning a fossil fuel phaseout – outside the usual UN process. Notably, calls to reduce petrochemicals were also on the table, with GAIA and others pushing for declining caps on plastic production as part of the transition. A second conference is already planned – in Tuvalu.

Gaza’s waste crisis: illegal dump sites and no end in sight

With Gaza’s waste infrastructure destroyed, 2,000 tonnes of rotting garbage is piling up daily next to camps of displaced families. The health consequences are only just beginning.

AI data centres are creating heat islands affecting 340 million people

A global survey of 6,000 data centres found they are warming the land around them by up to 9C – and the problem is largely underreported, even as they boom in number.

Breast implants to baby toys: the surprising sources of microplastics

A new report maps microplastic exposure across five areas of daily life – from children’s toys and household paint to hospital equipment and breast implants. Premature babies in neonatal units are estimated to receive up to 115 microplastic particles in just 72 hours. If you want to reduce your own exposure at home, the BBC has a practical guide on where to start.

Plastic is entering wheat and tomato plants – and stunting their growth

Microplastics in the soil are being absorbed by roots, and spread through the plant; polyester clothing fibres from laundry were found to be most harmful – and also the most prevalent in the sewage sludge used as fertiliser.

Sea levels are higher than we thought – and the land is sinking faster too

Two major new studies have found that 80 million people are already living on coastal land below sea level – and in many river deltas, the land is sinking faster than the sea is rising.

Every month we round up the top stories from the world of plastic pollution – and the work being done to stop it. From aquatic pollution to zero waste, you’ll always be up to date with the latest research, trends and greenwashing tactics.

To sign up click here.

When the System Fails, the Fire Starts

by Fayrouz on 28/04/2026 No comments

What would you do if your waste was not promptly collected in your area?

One day passes, and it starts to smell. One week passes, and it begins attracting pests and stray animals. When the rain comes, it blocks the drains and spreads disease. You cannot keep storing it indefinitely. You cannot simply ignore it.

So, what would you do?

For millions of people around the world, this is not a hypothetical question. It is a daily reality they face, and with all the limitations of the system around them, the easiest answer is to burn it.

Make the waste disappear

In many communities, burning waste is a daily routine, as ordinary as cooking or sweeping the front porch. Around 2.7 billion people in the world have no waste collection service at all. When there is no bin to fill, when no trash truck comes, when there is no system ready to take the problem away, waste piles up quickly – and that pile brings its own very real, very urgent consequences: rotting food, insects, blocked drains, the spread of disease. Burning solves those problems quickly, at least on the surface. This is not careless behaviour or ignorance. It is the reality of having to choose the least bad option from a very short list.

A global problem

Open burning is not limited to one region or one type of community. It is a global response to a global problem: too much plastic, most of it single-use, with no plan for where it ends up.

According to the Lloyd’s Register Foundation 2024 World Risk Poll, open burning is most widespread in Eastern Africa, where 41% of households use it as their primary method of waste disposal, followed by Central and Western Africa at 34%, and South-East Asia at 32%. In Indonesia, the number sits even higher than all of these regional averages, with 48% of households reported to burn their waste, despite open burning being prohibited by law. In rural communities across Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nepal, and Thailand, open burning is documented as a common household practice. In rural Thailand alone, more than half of all household waste is burned.

It also happens in places we would not expect. Open burning has been documented in Hungary, South Korea, and the United States, a reminder that this is not simply a problem of developing nations. In fact, the wealthiest countries in the world have not solved this problem either – they have largely exported it. High-income countries including Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, France, the US, Japan, and Australia have for years been shipping plastic waste abroad under the claim that it will be recycled. In 2023, Germany was the world’s largest plastic waste exporter at over 693,000 metric tons, with the UK close behind at around 615,000 metric tons. Much of that waste ends up in countries that lack the infrastructure to process it safely, where it is dumped or burned at the household and community level. Enforcement of regulations remains a major problem, with many waste exporters taking advantage of inadequate monitoring and poor border controls. The countries producing the most plastic have the least interest in dealing with where it ends up.

What actually happens when waste is burned

Photo credit: Abhinay Tharu/Unsplash

Burning waste does not make it disappear. It just makes it less visible, and out of sight is not the same thing as gone.

Burning waste, especially plastic, releases a toxic mix of pollutants into the air and into the soil through ash: heavy metals, styrene gas, dioxins and furans, chemicals that persist in the body and in the environment long after the fire goes out. A 2014 study published in Environmental Science & Technology found that open burning of household waste is one of the largest global sources of certain hazardous air pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine particles.

That last point is worth paying attention to. Fine particles known as PM2.5 are small enough to pass through the nose and throat and travel deep into the lungs and bloodstream. The WHO classifies outdoor air pollution, of which open burning is a significant contributor, as a leading environmental cause of death globally, responsible for around 3.2 million premature deaths every year.

The health impact, in numbers

The health data on open burning is difficult to read, and even harder to ignore.

One study estimated that open burning of waste is linked to between 270,000 and 920,000 deaths per year globally. Beyond that, open burning of plastics is linked to increased risks of heart disease and neurological disorders, while emissions including dioxins have been connected to skin lesions, cancer, immunological issues, and birth defects.

Sadly, this burden is not shared equally. The elderly, pregnant women, and children are among the most vulnerable. So too are the people tending the fires, and the neighbours living downwind. Harm also enters through the food chain: when toxins from burning settle into soil and water, they make their way into locally grown food and into the bodies of people who never stood near a fire at all.

The exposure does not look dramatic, but it keeps happening.

This is not large-scale burning as seen in factories or industrial incinerators. There is no towering smokestack, no warning sign, no obvious signal that something harmful is happening. There are only small fires, burning close to where people sleep, eat, and play, repeated every day, familiar enough to feel normal – and that familiarity is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

This gap is not simply a story of missing lorries and underfunded councils. It is the direct result of a production system that keeps making more plastic than the world can handle, and concentrating the consequences in the places with the least power to push back. At least 2 billion people worldwide have no access to any waste collection, treatment, or disposal services. For these communities, burning is not a choice. It is an inheritance.

The packaging problem makes everything worse. For most of human history, there was no need for large-scale waste collection. Most waste was organic, and what could be reused, reused. But single-use plastic packaging flooded markets far faster than any infrastructure could keep up, especially in island communities and rural areas where collection systems are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain. Global municipal waste generation is projected to grow from 2.3 billion tonnes in 2023 to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050, almost all of it driven by packaging and single-use materials landing in places that have no system in place to receive them.

And the companies that make that packaging? They have known about the problem they cause for a long time, but the burden of dealing with it has been consistently shifted, first onto public bodies, then onto households: manage it yourselves, find a way to make it disappear.

What can help, for now

There are small changes that can reduce the harm while the larger system gets its act together. Separating organic waste for composting and keeping plastic out of the fire entirely, significantly lowers exposure to dioxins, furans, and heavy metals.

This is not a complete solution, but it is not nothing either. Reducing the most toxic emissions is one small, real part of addressing the harm, even if it cannot address the system that causes it. For someone standing in front of a pile of waste with no bin to fill and no trash trucks coming, it is worth knowing.

The bigger picture

People who burn waste are not choosing pollution. They are not choosing to harm their neighbours, their children, or themselves. They are trapped in a system that was never built for them, one that was flooded with cheap plastic packaging without any consideration of its safety, or the infrastructure available to handle it.

Waste should not be managed at the point of burning. It should be prevented at the point of design. Better collection systems can ease the immediate harm, but they are a temporary fix to a permanent flow. The only real answer is less plastic being made in the first place, and producers being held accountable for every piece they release into the world.

Until products and systems change, the harm will keep being pushed onto the people with the fewest choices, and they have already been carrying it long enough.

The plastics crisis is also a women’s health crisis

by Fayrouz on 08/04/2026 No comments

We often talk about plastic pollution as if it is only an environmental problem – or a waste problem, something that only matters at the end of a product’s life. Uncollected or poorly managed waste contaminates air, soil, and water sources. Plastic waste, small and large, is found in the bodies of sea turtles and various marine animals. At its core, all of these are real and urgent problems, but sometimes we forget that there is another story that is far closer than other plastic problems, which is the problem of waste that silently lives inside our bodies.

Every day, our bodies are exposed to tens of thousands of petrochemicals – synthetic chemicals derived from petroleum and gas that are used to make plastics, packaging, cosmetics, cleaning products, and more. We encounter them through the products we use, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. This applies to everyone, but unfortunately, the impact is not the same for everyone.

The fact is, women’s bodies process these chemicals differently. Women tend to have thinner skin, so chemicals found in products that come into contact with their skin are more easily absorbed. Women also have a higher percentage of body fat, so more fat-soluble plastic chemicals such as phthalates and BPA, end up absorbed and stored inside their bodies. Women also typically have smaller than average body sizes, causing the concentration of those chemicals to be higher. And a slower metabolism means women’s bodies take longer to eliminate them.

These facts are not merely biological footnotes we can ignore because they sound too ordinary. They must change how we think about who bears the real cost of the plastic crisis.

The body stores everything we experience

Plastic is full of endocrine-disrupting chemicals – substances that interfere with our hormones. For women, whose health is so closely tied to hormonal balance throughout their lives, this disruption can be deeply damaging.

During puberty, pregnancy, and perimenopause, women’s bodies are in a state of change, meaning even the smallest toxic exposure during these important moments not only adds risk but also multiplies its effects. These chemicals are linked to fertility problems, certain cancers, and diabetes. They can ultimately also trigger early menopause and worsen symptoms like hot flashes and mood swings.

Sadly, this impact does not stop at one generation. Women unknowingly pass toxins from their bodies to their children during pregnancy and breastfeeding: a journey that women always remember in their lives becoming a silent transfer of toxins, even before their babies breathe air outside the womb.

Home is no longer a safe place

Traditional domestic roles place women in closer and more frequent contact with chemicals found in various household necessities such as cleaning products, packaging, synthetic rubber gloves that are ironically sold as “protection” – but actually become a new source of exposure.

Plastic chemicals are used in product formulas to create fragrance, colour, texture, and longer shelf life and are rarely tested for safety before reaching our hands.

Then there is the beauty sector. Marketing pressure deliberately targets women, endlessly pushing them to buy cosmetics, personal care products, fragrances, and hygiene products that almost all contain petrochemicals and are packaged in plastic. Even the most basic hygiene products are not spared from this danger: most sanitary pads and tampons that are affordable and easily accessible to the general public actually contain plastic that is harmful to their bodies.

More than 16,000 chemicals have been identified in plastic, and most of these substances have never been tested for safety regarding direct and indirect exposure for humans, more specifically, women. Of those, a quarter are already known to be hazardous but only 6% are regulated. The rest? No one is checking.

With no strong regulation or clear labeling of ingredients on products and packaging, there is no obvious way for women to know or understand the risks involved in their daily routines.

The health costs of earning a living

Photo credit: Mumtahina Tanni

Women are the dominant workforce in industries with high chemical exposure: cleaning, waste management, textiles, agriculture. Many of these jobs are informal in nature which means they have no regulations to ensure workers’ health and safety.

These jobs most often come without adequate personal protective equipment, are not covered by occupational health services, without sick leave, and without information about the risks they can and will face. Long working hours mean continuous and intense exposure to various toxins. These kinds of jobs are also usually low-paying, leaving workers with little power to change the situation.

Globally, the majority of waste pickers working at open dumpsites are women. WECF reports that many of them cannot live past the age of 30, and this is not a statistic from an era that has passed: it is still happening today.

Same plastic, unequal impact

Photo credit: MART Production

The plastic crisis does not discriminate in who it touches, but sadly it is very selective in how hard it hits.

Women bear a disproportionate chemical burden – through their biological body systems, the domestic roles they carry, the working conditions they must face, and the non-essential products they are told they need. With this many negative effects, women are still too rarely part of the conversations that decide what is produced, what is regulated, and what is labeled.

To change this, we need more legal protections for high-risk workers. We need honest product labeling. We need health and safety standards that actually apply to informal workers. And we need more women in the rooms where decisions and regulations about chemicals and production are made.

The plastic crisis is a women’s health crisis, it always has been. The question is, how much longer will we pretend otherwise?