Impact | Trash Hero World

Local Business Support on Koh Phangan

by Leslie Finlay on 11/07/2017 No comments

Trash Hero Koh Phangan in Thailand has been actively organizing beach, reef and jungle cleanups since its inception, and has successfully arranged partnerships and cooperative projects with other local organizations as well. Now local businesses are throwing in their support as well.

Local businesses so often are at the forefront of our regional success stories, and their impact can have incredible effects on behavior change toward waste. Chad and Colleen, owners of Veranda Phangan, joined Trash Hero Koh Phangan to increase awareness to an ever-growing population of tourists. Within just 30 days, their yoga center distributed more than 1,200 free liters of water to its yoga therapy teacher candidates and managed to generate zero plastic through the duration of the course.

It’s steps like these that can lead to an ongoing pattern of awareness and change. Read Chad and Colleen’s story below to see what small changes business owners and individuals alike can make toward spreading awareness of the issues and reducing physical waste and plastic.

To see more news or get involved with Trash Hero on Koh Phangan, check out its Facebook page.

—

Great things are happening on Koh Phangan in Thailand!

A movement of potential has dawned.

With more and more people visiting our gorgeous island, more and more trash is accumulating And more people are becoming aware of this challenge. **Progress** The awesome thing about awareness is that is also increases what people ASK for.

We are Chad and Colleen. Owners of Veranda Phangan in Chaloklum Koh Phangan, Thailand. We’ve been coming here for 15 years and finally decided to stay 1 yr ago. Our single concern becoming business owners and permanent residents of Koh Phangan was our impact on the island.

Within the first month we joined Trash hero. We were the 3^rd business on the island to join and were surprised to find we were the 1^st yoga and wellness related business to join.

So…we hopped on the campaign and spent A LOT of time increasing awareness through social media channels and word of mouth supporting the 2 Trash Hero volunteers who were working hard build a cohesive community here.

We ran our specialised trauma-informed yoga therapy teacher training in January and supplied our students with **FREE** Trash Hero bottles. Over the next 30 days during this intensive and professional yoga therapy teacher training we supplied over 1200 litres of FREE drinking water to our students. Amazing to realise ZERO plastic was generated in any way throughout this entire course.

What else does Veranda Phangan do to support sustainable tourism?

We clean our beach front property every day (which is common for all business owners on the island). We also know that tourism is increasing, which is great for Thailand being a tourism-driven economy. If an increase in tourism is going to be sustainable we must be aware of our Entire footprint extending beyond the environment too. For this reason we have developed a sustainable tourism policy.

What do we know for sure?

Small Family Run Businesses Do Make a Difference. Choose to support them on your travels.

What do we hope to see next?

We’re really looking forward to continuing our Trash Hero World and sustainable tourism efforts on Koh Phangan with our upcoming teacher training courses and retreats.

We also really hope people will start ASKING for recyclable bottles, or travelling with their own and making educated choices for the wellbeing of the countries they visit.

If you find yourself on Koh Phangan, stop by for a coconut and water refill. We’d love to meet you.

Safe travels

Chad and Colleen

Verandaphangan.com

#ReduceReUseRecycle #BringYourBottle #Verandaphangan #yogateachertrainingthailand #AmazingThailand

Trash Hero Alex’s Birthday

by Amelia Meier on 09/02/2017 No comments

9 February 2017 – Trash Hero Indonesia

A few weeks ago, Trash Hero Indonesia volunteers received this message:

“Hey Trash Hero,

I need your help! My son, Alex, is incredibly concern with the trash on Bali and has truly taken it to heart. For some reason, he really wants a Beach Cleanup Party for his 7th birthday, which is on February 2. His exact words were “On my 7th birthday, I want to go to the beach and find a big table with all the things we need. I want to get many strangers to come, and we can then tell tell them what to do to clean the beach” We all want to make this happen, and are hoping that you guys can help. I want to make this event public and make my Alex’ dream come true. Please let me know if you can be a part of this. Thank you”

Hélène and the other volunteers of Trash Hero Indonesia immediately got on board and assisted wherever possible. Alex’ mom did an amazing job at making the event known to the public and inviting people, and last Sunday they all gathered at the beach in Canggu and enjoyed a cleanup and some real birthday fun.

Alex has since gone on to be a regular hero, as you can see here. How awesome is it that young Alex is already infected with the Trash Hero virus?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEX, AND ALL THE BEST FOR YOUR TRASH-FREE FUTURE!

Myanmar is Moving Fast

by Amelia Meier on 24/01/2017 No comments

24 January 2017 – Trash Hero Myanmar

Watch a wonderful movie Trash Hero Myanmar made about their work here, or check a recent segment that was aired in the news here. Trash Heroes have been active in Myanmar since July 2016, when a first chapter was founded in Yangon, Myanmar. The movement has made headway quickly, with a further three chapters (Mandalay, Ngwe Saung, and Pyin Oo Lwin) created within 4 months, and the plan to have three more in place by the end of 2017.

Only half a year into Trash Hero Myanmar, many cleanups have already taken place: The capital Yangon has seen the most action, although events have also taken place in Ngwe Saung Beach, Mandalay, Pyin Oo Lwin, and Dawei. A dedicated team of volunteer led by Country Coordinator Phone Kyaw Moe Myint plans and realizes all events.

So far, around 1700 volunteers have picked up over 9000 kg of trash. The trash is disposed of at sites designated by the government for now, as efforts to recycle and reuse the waste are underway. Myanmar is going through a huge transition on many fronts and is facing many challenges. Trash Hero Myanmar’s main goal is to make a difference by effecting behavioral change among the people, so that littering is reduced.

For 2017, Phone Kyaw Moe Myint and his team are planning the addition of new chapters, among them Bagan. Meanwhile, Inle Lake and Minbu and are further strengthening the ties with local leaders. The next cleanup event in Yangon will be taking place on 29 January 2017, and volunteers will be cleaning Ngwe Saung on 9 February 2017.

From Trash Hero Trang

by Amelia Meier on 23/01/2017 No comments

23 January 2017 – Trash Hero Trang (Thailand)

Trash Heroes from Trash Hero Trang (Thailand) have just made the news. Watch it here. Making us proud!

Amazing Video by Trash Hero Myanmar

by Amelia Meier on 20/01/2017 No comments

20 January 2017 – Trash Hero Mandalay & Pyin Oo Lwin (Myanmar)

Trash Hero Mandalay & Pyin Oo Lwin have created the most amazing video of their recent cleanup. Their work was supported by the Mayor of Mandalay and many local businesses, who -along with the dedicated organizers and volunteers- contributed to this success.

See it here.

Trash Hero Myanmar already counts three chapters (Ngwe Saung, Mandalay, and Pyin Oo Lwin), and is planning on many events for this coming year. Stay tuned!

Trash Hero Mandalay & Pyin Oo Lwin

မႏၲေလးႏွင့္ျပင္ဦးလြင္တို့တြင္ မိိမိေဒသလွပ သန့္ရွင္း အမွိုက္ကင္းေစလိုေသာဆႏၵရွိသူအမွိုက္ေကာက္ သူရဲေကာင္းအေယာက္၃၀၀ေက်ာ္တို့သည္မိမိတို့၏တန္ဖိုးရွိလွေသာအခ်ိန္မ်ားကိုေပးျပီး Trash Hero ၏ ပထမဆံုးေျခလွမ္းကိုေအာင္ျမင္စြာ လွဳပ္ရွားစတင္ခ့ဲ ပါသည္ မိမိကိုယ္က်ိုးတစံုတရာမပါ အမ်ားေကာင္း က်ိုးကို ေစတနာသန့္သန့္ျဖင့္ ပူးေပါင္းပါဝင္လမ္းညႊန္ခ့ဲ ပါေသာမႏၲေလးတိုင္းေဒသ ျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ဝန္ေဒါက္တာ ဦးရဲလြင္ စည္ပင္သာယာေရး အဖြဲ႕ဝင္မ်ားႏွင္ ့္လိုအပ္ေသာေငြေၾကး ေထာက္ပ့ံသူမ်ားအားလံုးအား လွိုက္လွဲစြာေက်းဇူးတင္ပါသည္သူရဲေကာင္းဆိုတဲ့စကားလံုးေလးဟာ စိတ္ဓာတ္ခြန္ အား ျမွင့္တင္ျခင္းတခုပါ မိမိတို့ရည္မွန္းခ်က္သည္အမွိုက္ကင္းစင္ေသာေဒသမွသည္အမွိုက္ကင္းစင္ေသာနိုင္ငံဆီသို့ဦးတည္ျပီး ေနာက္ထပ္ေျခလွမ္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာျကိုးစားေလ်ွာက္လွမ္းပါမည္A very big thank you to all those that took part in our very first Trash Hero clean up in Mandalay and Pyin Oo Lwin. This video is dedicating to all the heroes and organizations who spent their free time and effort to make these cities a cleaner place. A heartfelt appreciation to the Mayor of Mandalay who supported us and all the sponsors and Organizer to make this amazing event happen! Love and Respect to you all and lets make Myanmar a cleaner place!

Posted by Trash Hero Mandalay on Donnerstag, 19. Januar 2017

@Work Program in the (Swiss) News

by Amelia Meier on 06/01/2017 No comments

06 January 2017 – Trash Hero @Work Program

Our recent launch of the Trash Hero @Work program has just been written about in a Swiss newspaper from Lucerne. Read it here.

Trash Hero World’s @Work program creates a solid basis for reducing corporate and business waste to a minimum. In a first step, all office waste on an average day is analysed in detail. One by one, steps are then taken to reduce waste to a minimum. Employees might all commit to using our stainless steel bottles, or use their own containers to pick up their lunches. Slowly but surely, employees can move towards implementing a zero waste philosophy and can see how small changes make a big difference.

Planting Mangroves on Langkawi

by Amelia Meier on 18/12/2016 No comments

18 December 2016 – Trash Hero Langkawi

A team of 7 heroes didn’t collect any trash, but instead participated in a tree-planting event organised by Flag Langkawi (Friends of Langkawi Geopark). Flag had invited officials and people from a variety of organisations to join and plant mangroves on Pulau Dayang Bunting.

A total of around 50 people and representatives from the local authority (LADA) met at the pier and enjoyed a few talks on the importance of mangroves for maintaining the environment. Afterwards, shoes were removed and the volunteers dug holes in the mud and added seeds. In many areas that mud was knee-deep, so staying clean wasn’t an option.According to officials, a total of 1000 plants were planted. A huge success, and so much fun!

Launch of Trash Hero @Work Program

by Amelia Meier on 17/12/2016 No comments

17 December 2016 – Trash Hero Word & GKS Architekten + Partner AG

We have just launched the @Work program in cooperation with the architectural office GKS Architekten + Partner AG from Lucerne, Switzerland . The aim of the program is to reduce office waste to a minimum, and our project creates a solid basis for this. The 50 employees of the awesome architectural office GKS Architekten + Partner rang in a new era by committing themselves to the zero-waste philosophy, and will be doing everything they can to reduce their internal waste.

In a first step, team members examined the trash they as a company were producing daily. They estimated that they were using 2,600 disposable plastic dishes, 3,200 glas bottles, and around one ton of paper per year. Since this company takes corporate social responsibility seriously, they are all wenn under way to going zero waste: they will be avoiding trash wherever possible, strictly separating, and will try to use recyclable materials. To eliminate drinking bottles every GKS employee received a personalised Trash Hero bottle made of stainless steel as a Christmas present.

We are grateful for this amazing collaboration with GKS! Other corporations have already voiced interest as well, and we hope to inspire many more businesses to implement sustainable changes in the future! Read the full press release here.

Trash Hero Thailand Wins

by Amelia Meier on 08/11/2016 No comments

8 November 2016 – Trash Hero Thailand Wins Thailand Green Excellence Award

We are delighted to announce that Trash Hero Thailand has won the Thailand Green Excellence Award in the category “Outstanding Contribution to Green Tourism in Thailand”. Her Royal Highness Princess of Thailand Ubol Ratanarachakanya Siriwatanaphanwadi presented the prestigious awards during a memorable ceremony hosted at the World Travel Market London on 7 November 2016 in the British capital. World Travel Market London is a leading global event for the travel industry, bringing together 51’500 participants and representatives from nearly every country in the world. The perfect occasion to spread the Trash Hero word, and we enjoyed making new friends from Dubai, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Trash Hero Shanghai’s First Cleanup

by Amelia Meier on 03/11/2016 No comments

3 November 2016 – Trash Hero Shanghai

Trash Hero World is now also in China… starting in Shanghai! Their first weekly cleanup just took place and many more will follow. We’re hoping that the movement will now spread out to many more locations in China!