We are excited to share that our Trash Hero kids’ book is now available in an 8th language: Arabic!
Huge thanks to the Trash Hero Kuwait volunteers who helped to translate and do the layout and to Al-Sayer Group who sponsored the printing. The book and activity programme will now be available to 1,000 children for free, bringing the Trash Hero message to a new generation in Kuwait.
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Three pilot classes have been implemented as part of the Trash Hero Kids’ Programme in Switzerland, with the aim of raising environmental awareness among children from 1st to 3rd grade and teaching them how to live sustainably and reduce plastic in their everyday life.
As part of the Programme we developed a book which tells the story of a fictional character who helps to reduce plastic waste, so that the animals and nature around them are not harmed. The book shows, in a simple and child-friendly way, the impact of plastic waste pollution on the environment and teaches that each individual can make a change every day and become a Trash Hero themselves.
In Bratsch in the canton of Valais, our book was read as a group in the morning circle over a period of several months. When doing handicrafts, more attention was paid to using recycled materials and creating something new from old things. In addition, focus weeks were held in various subjects. The content of the programme is in line with Curriculum 21 and the Kid’s Book is suitable for art, German maths, as well as for sports and music classes. A pogramme highlight was the Cleanup, with the whole school taking part across four villages. Divided into four groups, several full bags of trash were collected and then disposed of by the community.
The school concluded: “Thank you very much for letting us be part of the Trash Hero project. We will continue with it this school year and will take a deeper look at earthworm composting. The Trash Hero Kid’s Book is appropriate for children and sustainable for learning. We spend a lot of time outdoors and because of the story, it’s much easier to talk to kids about trash in nature.”
For more information on the Trash Hero Kid’s Book go to: https://trashhero.org/trash-hero-kids-book/
Want to implement the Trash Hero Kids Programme in your school? Contact us at: kids@trashhero.org
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In the evening of November 12th, Trash Hero took part in a very special event – a gala with an acoustic concert organised in Hotel Alexander (Weggis, Switzerland).
A piano and guitar set was performed by a Swiss singer and song-writer Eliane, winner of the second season of Switzerland’s Got Talent. Eliane is an ambassador for Schnarwiler’s cosmetics lines “Trash Hero Love” and “Re-use-me” and is an avid supporter of Trash Hero’s activities.
Throughout the evening, we received over $3500 in donations, including the entire amount earned by the guitarist for the night who kindly donated his salary, which we are extremely grateful for!
The gala was organised by Schnarwiler, a Swiss based manufacturer and distributor of beauty and health products, who have launched a zero-waste line of toiletry products in collaboration with Trash Hero. During the event, Roman Peter had the opportunity to deliver a presentation to an audience of around 100 people, explaining the mission and vision of Trash Hero, as well as inviting attendees to join the movement.
We would like to especially thank Eliane for her role in this fundraising event, and for her continued commitment to raising awareness about our mission.
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The data collection for the 2021 brand audit has been successfully completed! This year, 141 brand audits were carried out across 58 chapters in 8 countries, including Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite working under the challenging circumstances of COVID-19, our organisation has submitted roughly 50% more brand audit reports compared to last year.
Brand audits have been organised by Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) since 2018 to identify and hold to account the world’s top polluters through the categorisation of branded plastic packaging collected during cleanups. The results can be used as evidence of the scale of consumer-goods-related pollution, and push the biggest manufacturers to take responsibility for the plastic waste they produce. As a part of this movement, Trash Hero shares the common mission to bring about systemic change and promote real solutions to eliminate the need for single-use packaging and shift towards a circular economy.
We would like to thank all Trash Hero chapters and volunteers who participated in this year’s brand audit. The report is anticipated to be published by the end of October*. Trash Hero will contribute translations of the executive summary into Thai and Malaysian, in order to increase the media coverage worldwide.
*Update: link to the 2021 Brand Audit Report
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The Trash Hero kids’ story and activity book has been translated into a sixth language – Malaysian!
With the help of Trash Hero Malaysia volunteers, 1000 children on both Borneo and the mainland will soon get the chance to be heroes through our hands-on learning programme.
17,830 copies of the book have been printed since its launch in 2018. It is currently available in English, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, Burmese, Czech and German.
We are grateful to our local sponsors in Langkawi:
– Pelangi Beach Resort & Spa
– The Westin Langkawi Resort & Spa
– Umgawa Legendary Adventures
– Langkawi Christmas Bazaar
who covered the cost of the Malaysian print run.
You can find more resources for kids in the dedicated section on our website.
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“Through our actions, we can highlight that the system isn’t good enough […] We no longer want to wait for the state to do something, for someone else to do something, for a neighbour to do something, therefore I’ll do something. I’m the one.”
So speaks our own Dragana Katić, volunteer leader of Trash Hero Beograd in Serbia, in this mini-documentary. This is the first episode in a year-long series produced by Eho animato, as part of an inspiring project that artistically examines the problems of social apathy and absence of agency in dealing with one of the most concerning issues of our times – the environment.
“The Ways of the Heroes” is an international, multi-year project of 7 partner organisations that intends to emphasise and share the stories of the many individuals acting for good in their communities, but who perhaps are not visible enough. Inspired by Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People, which questions the impact of individuals on the community and vice versa, the project focuses on bringing stories of these hidden heroes to international audiences. Theatre, videos, public space performances, exhibitions, illustrated books for children and online campaigns are the means that will be used to share these stories.
We are very grateful to have been featured in this work and look forward to following the project’s progress.
Director: Ana Konstantinović
Scriptwriter: Tamara Baračkov
Cinematographer: Milovan Ilić
Editor: Marija Kovačina
Composer: Yorgos Doussos
Assistant director: Željko Maksimović
Color grading & aerial footage: Ivan Nikolić
Production: Eho animato, July 2021
Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Supported by Belgrade City Council and Ministry of Culture of Republic of Serbia.
The Trash Hero movement has recently reached a very important milestone on the journey to zero-waste: more than 2 MILLION KG of trash collected! As of 30 June 2021:
But, where are those numbers coming from? Every Trash Hero chapter posts their cleanup results on social media and uploads the data directly to a central collection point. Anyone can check the data live on our website: https://trashhero.org/our-network/.
All these achievements are down to the hundreds of thousands of people that have gotten us this far: picking up, sorting and auditing waste, educating others about plastic pollution and creating momentum for wider change.
Watch the video below to see how our volunteers are sharing the great news:
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With the pandemic still preventing meeting in person, our first round of family meetings for 2021 were again held online. Trash Hero World organised two global Zoom calls, while chapters in Indonesia, Thailand , Malaysia and Switzerland also hosted their own.
While we acknowledge that a remote meeting cannot adequately match a face-to-face discussion, we appreciate that it does increase accessibility and inclusivity by offering the opportunity to connect with people across borders.
This year’s series of family meetings were attended by 174 participants in 15 different countries. It was evident to us that although the pandemic may have reduced our capacity to organise and attend cleanups, it could not dampen the spirit, energy and commitment to the cause of our dedicated volunteers.
During our meetings, we were able to share new developments and updates regarding our programmes and global strategy. It also provided an excellent opportunity for our volunteers to get to know each other and develop a synchronised approach. We encouraged this by allowing participants to make use of the breakout rooms feature in order to discuss their experiences and ideas about advancing the operations of local chapters and cleanups, especially during times of crisis.
Trash Hero World would be nothing without our family of volunteers, so we would like to thank each and every one of you for your continued time and devotion to creating a plastic-free world.
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Like so much of our lives this year, the Trash Hero family meetings moved online, taking place virtually in November and December. After the first round of meetings, normally held in April / May, were cancelled, it was important to bring people together to reconnect and regroup – no matter what the circumstances. Our volunteers in Czech Republic, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar joined in-country sessions with Zoom or Google Meet; Trash Hero World also hosted two calls for volunteers in our global chapters.
We held breakout sessions to allow people to exchange stories from often very different experiences of lockdown; communicated important country and global updates; carried out training for different aspects of our programmes; and – as always – had some lively and fun discussions. As sessions had to be kept relatively short, we omitted our normal leaders’ academy. This will instead be made available as an online programme in 2021.
While it was impossible to reproduce the unique energy and interaction generated at an on-site meeting, the huge advantage of online sessions is that we were able to reach far more people, in far more places than ever before. This series of online family meetings engaged 276 participants in 18 different countries, compared with 197 people in 5 countries (in person) at the same time last year. Many of these participants had never had the chance to attend a family meeting previously, as we only offer them on site in countries with a large number of active chapters and to a limited number of representatives from each.
We are all hoping that we can move out of the current situation next year and return to the usual format to bring our Trash Hero family together; however we plan to keep the online sessions regardless as they proved to be a valuable tool to connect, motivate and share knowledge with our heroes around the globe.
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With our cleanup programme now well established in dozens of locations around Southeast Asia, many of our volunteers are ready to take things to the next level: to move beyond picking up the trash and initiate community-level waste reduction programmes, in conjunction with local authorities.
It was with this in mind that we embarked on the “Trash Hero Zero Waste Communities” training programme, the first of hopefully many collaborations with our esteemed partners in the Break Free From Plastic movement. Based on a concept developed by Let’s Do It Foundation and organised by their educators, the programme brought together European and Southeast Asian experts from organisations such as Zero Waste Europe, GAIA Asia-Pacific and YPBB, as well as leading regional academics. The goal was to combine technical knowledge about waste management with the real life examples, skills and networking needed to kick start a zero waste project in participants’ own communities.
Due to the pandemic, the training was conducted online with volunteers in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia in October and November 2020. The 2-day sessions introduced topics such as:
– Principles of circular economy
– Community waste auditing
– Building convincing arguments for zero waste (overview of false solutions and greenwashing)
– Real life examples of zero waste projects in Asia
and also included group work and discussion. They gave a basic overview of zero waste principles and strategies and laid the groundwork for the next stage of the programme: planning their own initiative and getting people on board.
The English language presentations prepared for the training by Dr. Enzo Favoino (Zero Waste Europe) and Miko Aliño (GAIA Asia-Pacific), along with that of the Malaysian incinerator expert, Mr Lam Choong Wah, can be found on our YouTube channel:
Note: the English presentations are an incomplete set of what was shown, as other contributions were in local languages. To view the full set of training materials in Indonesian, Thai or Malay, please visit our channel playlists. These playlists also include the English presentations dubbed into local languages, which we did to facilitate understanding of the often quite complex subject matter.
Despite the challenges of holding an online training programme, we were able to recruit a total of 81 participants for the live events. Out of these, 70 completed the two days and a further 51 did a follow-up activity to gain a certificate as a Zero Waste Practitioner (foundation level).
Feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive regarding the opportunity to learn about these topics, and the quality of the content; however the limitations of online interaction, connectivity issues and the need to accomodate a wide range of time zones were felt by many to be obstacles to learning. We received multiple suggestions to hold the next training session in person to allow for more in-depth discussion.
Restrictions permitting, that is exactly what we intend to do in 2021. It is clear that there is an appetite for this kind of knowledge and, if provided in local language direct to our volunteers on the ground, the potential to create real impact is there too.
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