News | Trash Hero World

The Ways of the Heroes

by Seema on 03/08/2021 No comments

“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.

2 million kg of trash collected!

by Martyna Morawska on 20/07/2021 2 comments

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:

We have engaged 391,791 volunteers, including 98,341 kids.
We have done 13,598 cleanups, collecting 2,005,774 kg of trash.
We are active in 162 locations in 20 countries around the world.
Our bottle programme has distributed 102,129 bottles, avoiding 37.3 million single-use plastic bottles and 1,940 tons of CO2 emissions.
27,360 reusable bags have been distributed, saving 10 million plastic bags.

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:

174 volunteers join the first family meetings of 2021

by Martyna Morawska on 07/05/2021 No comments

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.

Family Meetings 2020 move online

by Seema on 17/12/2020 No comments

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.

Zero Waste Communities volunteer training

by Seema on 10/12/2020 4 comments

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.

Carbon footprint of reusable Trash Hero Bottles found to be 95% less than single-use plastic bottles

by Seema on 07/12/2020 1 comment

We all know that switching to reusables instead of single-use for everyday items like cutlery, food packaging and water bottles avoids a lot of plastic. Reducing waste and pollution is usually the main motivation for people who choose to reuse.

In addition to this, a recent study has also quantified the climate positive impact of the Trash Hero reusable bottle, by avoiding the greenhouse gas emissions associated with single-use plastic, as well as the money saved in the long term.

In 2019, René Mettler, a masters student at ETH Zürich, carried out research into the cost-efficiency of reusables vs. single-use systems of delivery. In one of the case studies, he compared the carbon footprint of consuming single-use plastic bottles of drinking water with refilling a Trash Hero stainless steel bottle with the equivalent amount of water at a hotel in Thailand. It was shown that the reusable system not only avoided plastic waste, but also reduced costs and greenhouse gas emissions. [René Mettler (2019). How to tackle the plastic crisis – a project-based cost efficiency assessment.]

How this was worked out
The study looked at the full life cycle of the two types of packaging systems only, not the water used to fill them. “Full life cycle” means: extraction of materials, production, use, disposal and any recovery of materials.

300 “usage cycles” were measured for each option, i.e. 300 single-use plastic bottles vs. 300 refills of the Trash Hero bottle.

The calculations were made using the following key assumptions:

Plastic bottles come in a standard weight and size (600ml, made up of 17.4g mixed plastics).
A fixed amount of water, heated to 60°C, is used for cleaning the reusable bottles and the 20 litre reusable drinking water tanks used to fill them. Note: the study was conducted in Thailand where it is not possible to drink water from the tap.
Emissions from transport are neglected as they are expected to occur within both systems on a comparable level and to be relatively small overall.
All plastic bottles get recycled at the end of their life.

This last is a very generous assumption, given that global recycling rates for PET bottles are around 25% and far less in many countries. It means that the figures used are very conservative.

A more likely scenario for ‘end of life’ is that the bottles end up either in landfill, burned openly or in an incinerator to “recover energy”, or discarded on land or in water (the bottles pictured, left, were collected at a single Trash Hero beach cleanup in Koh Lanta, Thailand).

However, it was decided not to include these options in the calculation. The range of factors that determine any waste management scenario is very wide and much depends on the local context. Singling out any one could lead to the relevancy of the data being questioned. Instead, plastic bottles are given the fairest possible chance, with some material always being recovered.

The researcher has however confirmed that taking into consideration the more likely end-of-life alternatives would always lead to an increase in the calculated carbon footprint of plastic bottles. This is in addition to the negative health impacts caused by disposal and incineration, both of which release toxic chemicals (in the form of ash, fumes or microplastics) into the atmosphere and food chain.

Crunching the numbers
Working with the above assumptions, and rounding to the nearest gram, the study found that a single use plastic water bottle creates approximately 56g of CO₂ emissions during its short life.

Meanwhile, the Trash Hero bottle and a reusable container used to dispense drinking water together release about 909g of CO₂. But of course these bottles can be – and are – reused. Refilling a Trash Hero bottle generates only 2g of CO₂ emissions – around 28 times less than drinking from single-use plastic.

Using these numbers, we can say that after only 17 refills, the Trash Hero bottle starts to have a positive effect:

➤ 1 Trash Hero bottle + 17 refills creates: (909g) + (17 x 2g) = 943g CO₂ emissions in total
➤ 17 single-use plastic bottles create: 56g x 17 = 952g CO₂ emissions in total

So when you switch to a Trash Hero bottle and refill it 17 times, the greenhouse gas footprint is already less than that of the 17 single-use plastic bottles of drinking water you would have used instead. Any further refills result in a “saving” of CO₂ as more plastic bottles are avoided.

This net saving is equal to 56g – 2g = 54g of CO₂ every time you choose to refill rather than purchase a plastic bottle of water.

Over one year, if you refill once per day and avoid buying any plastic bottles of water, you will have reduced your CO₂ footprint by just over 19kg!

Of course, this is actually a very small percentage of your overall annual carbon footprint – try not to drive to the refill point or order a steak with your water! – but as a direct comparison between packaging systems, the Trash Hero reusable option reduces your impact by around 95% vs. single-use plastic.

The conclusion
This is the first climate impact study done on the Trash Hero bottle and our refill programme. In the particular case considered, at a hotel in Thailand supplying drinking water to its guests, the reusable delivery system had a significantly lower rate of carbon dioxide emissions (95% less) than single-use plastic bottles, with sustained use (more than 17 refills).

In terms of the overall carbon footprint of an individual, the impact of switching to reusable bottles from single-use is likely to be very low, especially factoring in other activities such as transport or diet. However in the context of packaging and delivery systems, the climate positive impact of using the Trash Hero bottle is clear. At scale, small changes such as this can become important. A report in Science Daily in 2019 notes that “emissions from plastics will reach 17% of the global carbon budget by 2050.”

We also know that switching to the Trash Hero bottle reduces plastic waste and saves you money by avoiding bottled water. So we can say for our bottle, these are the new 3 Rs:

REDUCE plastic waste
REDUCE climate impact
REDUCE costs

To work out exactly how much you could reduce, or already have, we have created two bottle impact calculators, linked to this study. The first is for individuals and the second is for hotels to work out the savings made by replacing plastic water bottles in their rooms with the reusable Trash Hero bottles. Give them a try: you may be surprised at the results!

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René Mettler’s Master Thesis was jointly supervised by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich) and the sustainability solutions provider, South Pole. It analysed the cost efficiency of waste management and reusable packaging projects. One of these projects was the Trash Hero bottle programme, as implemented in a hotel in southern Thailand. The results showed that the bottle programme does not only lead to environmental benefits such as avoided plastic waste and CO2 emissions, it also saves costs. Our thanks to volunteer Caroline Schweisgut-Heimgartner for her help with interpreting the data.

The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo and Nestlé named top plastic polluters for the third year in a row

by Seema on 02/12/2020 No comments

The results of Break Free From Plastic’s annual Brand Audit Report have been released today, confirming that, for the third year in row, the same few companies are responsible for the vast quantities of single-use plastic polluting our planet.

In total, during August and September, 14,734 volunteers in 55 countries conducted 575 brand audits, collecting 346,494 pieces of plastic waste and recording the type and the company that produced it. 15% (90) of these audits were carried out by our own Trash Hero volunteers at their weekly cleanup – a fantastic contribution to the research that we are very proud of. And, for the first time, more than 300 waste pickers were engaged across the Global South to audit the waste they sort on a daily basis.

Despite the challenges of organising during a global pandemic, the volunteers safely coordinated more brand audit events in more countries this year than in the previous two years.

63% of the plastic collected in the 2020 study was marked with a clear consumer brand. In total, more than 5,000 brands were catalogued. Analysis from Break Free From Plastic revealed the following as the 2020 Top 10 Global Polluters:

The Coca-Cola Company;
PepsiCo;
Nestlé;
Unilever;
Mondelez International;
Mars, Inc.;
Procter & Gamble;
Philip Morris International;
Colgate-Palmolive; and
Perfetti Van Melle.

From the executive summary of the report, which Trash Hero translated into Indonesian, Malay and Thai to help disseminate the information to a wider audience:

“The title of Top Global Polluters describes the parent companies whose brands were recorded polluting the most places around the world with the greatest amount of plastic waste. The 2020 Top Global Polluters remain remarkably consistent with previous brand audit reports, demonstrating that the same corporations are continuing to pollute the most places with the most single-use plastic. Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo have remained the Top Three Global Polluters every year since [BFFP’s] first global brand audit in 2018.

For the third consecutive year, Coca-Cola emerged as the #1 Top Global Polluter. A total of 13,834 branded Coca-Cola plastics were recorded in 51 countries, reflecting more plastic than the next two top global polluters combined. These results amount to a significant increase, as 2,102 more branded Coca-Cola plastic items were recorded in 14 more countries in 2020 than in last year’s global brand audit.

Seven of the top polluters — The Coca-Cola Company; PepsiCo; Nestlé; Unilever; Mondelez International; Mars, Inc.; and Colgate-Palmolive — have joined The New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, but this is not enough. According to a recent Ellen MacArthur report, the signatories to the New Plastic Economy Global Commitment have only reduced their use of virgin plastic by only 0.1% from 2018 to 2019.

The Break Free From Plastic movement is calling on companies to urgently reduce the amount of single-use plastic they use. The top polluters must reveal how much single-use plastic they use, then set clear, measurable targets for reducing the quantity of single-use plastic items they produce. Finally, they must reinvent their product delivery systems to move beyond single-use plastic altogether.”

New resource library for volunteers

by Seema on 20/11/2020 No comments

As Trash Heroes, our regular cleanups make us very visible in the community. Our volunteers often find themselves invited to meetings, panel discussions or talks about waste management. Trash Hero World is committed to ensuring they are armed with the best possible knowledge about the plastic crisis and how to solve it. In this way, they become more able to influence both their local community and decision-makers.

To this end, we have:

started a series of “Zero Waste Communities” workshops in Southeast Asia (more about these will be published in a separate post),
updated our Chapter Handbook (a training guide for all volunteers) to include a simple overview and assessment of some commonly proposed “solutions” to plastic pollution,
created a free, multilingual resource library on our website to gather information on the various topics and debates surrounding the issues and
started to translate some of the existing materials into local languages to allow them to be spread more widely

Our first set of materials, a factsheet on chemical recycling, produced by the experts at GAIA, has just been published in Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai, Arabic and Czech language.

Indonesian PDF –> Daur Ulang Kimiawi
Malaysian PDF –> Kitar semula kimia
Thai PDF –> คําถามและคำตอบเกี่ยวกับการรีไซเคิลทางเคมี
Czech PDF –> Chemical Recycling (Čeština)
Arabic PDF –> أسئلة و أجوبة: إعادة التدوير كيميائياً

Chemical recycling was chosen as it is a “hot topic” and one that is frequently misrepresented. Information about such new technologies is often only available in English, making them difficult to understand and refute in the low and middle income countries where we are active – and where they are aggressively marketed.

This factsheet explains in simple terms why chemical recycling is not a silver bullet solution to plastic pollution as is claimed. In a society that urgently needs to transition from a linear, fossil fuel economy to a circular one, chemical recycling is a distraction at best. It suggests to focus resources on solutions that actually work, particularly those that stop the problem at the source.

Our goal is to do more of this translation and education work. We believe it is a valuable tool to counter industry misinformation at the grassroots and beyond.

Das Trash Hero Kinderbuch jetzt auch auf Deutsch

by Sabrina on 12/11/2020 2 comments

WE CLEAN – WE EDUCATE – WE CHANGE

Tadaa! 🎉 Das Trash Hero Kinderbuch gibt es jetzt auch auf Deutsch! 💛

Das Kinderbuch “Trash Hero” von Seema Prabhu, übersetzt von Sabrina Ritz und Illustrationen von Ewelina Wajgert bringt Kindern die komplexen Themen Umweltverschmutzung, Abfall und Recycling auf ganz einfache Art und Weise näher. Die englische Version ist bereits seit 2018 erfolgreich im Einsatz und inspiriert Kinder in verschiedenen Ländern.

Für Kopf, Herz und Hand
💛 Das Buch führt mit einer einfühlsamen Geschichte in die Themen Plastikmüll und Umweltverschmutzung ein.
🤔 … regt zum Nachdenken an.
💡 … zeigt Zusammenhänge auf.
👣 … schult das Bewusstsein, welchen Einfluss wir Menschen auf unseren Planeten haben.
♻️ … liefert grundlegende Informationen und Erklärungen zum Thema Abfall und Recycling in einer kindsgerechten Sprache.
🦸🏻‍♀️ … motiviert die Kinder mit praktischen Aufgaben ihren eigenen Plastikverbrauch zu reduzieren und selber ein Trash Hero werden.

Worum geht’s?
Die Geschichte um den kleinen Trash Hero stellt auf nachdenkliche und visuell eindrucksvolle Weise die Verbindung her zwischen dem Problem der Verschmutzung durch Plastik und wie jeder Einzelne von uns zur Lösung beitragen kann.
Die Mission von Trash Hero ist es, die Verschmutzung der Meere durch Plastik zu stoppen und damit Meerestiere zu schützen. Er stösst jedoch an seine Grenzen, weil immer mehr Plastik weggeworfen wird. Trash Hero braucht Hilfe bei seiner Mission! Kannst du ihm helfen?
Mit diesem Aufruf zur Mithilfe und den 7 Zero Waste Challenges werden die Kinder eingeladen, Trash Hero bei seiner Aufgabe zu unterstützen. Wenn wir gute Gewohnheiten im Umgang mit Abfall in unseren Alltag integrieren, können wir alle Helden sein und unseren Planeten retten. 🌍

Für wen?
🏫 Schulen: Das Buch eignet sich ideal für Schulklassen. Für Lehrpersonen gibt es einen Lehrerkommentar dazu mit einigen weiterführenden Informationen und Tipps für die Durchführung.
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Privatgebrauch: für deine eigenen Kinder

Interesse?
⬇️ Privatpersonen können die digitale Version hier herunterladen.
📧 Bei Interesse an einer gedruckten Version für den Einsatz in der Schule schreibe eine Nachricht an kids@trashhero.org.
📖 Nähere Infos findest du im Lehrerkommentar. Teile ihn gerne mit deiner Schule und deinen Lehrerkollegen

HERZLICHEN DANK an AXA XL für die finanzielle Unterstützung und an die Druckerei Oetterli AG, welche die Bücher zu einem Sondertarif gedruckt hat.

Keiner ist zu klein, ein Trash Hero zu sein!

Für die Trash Heroes von morgen! 💛

Trash Hero’s corporate partners

by Roman Peter on 13/10/2020 No comments

With all the negative media coverage about plastic pollution, it feels like consumer goods and petrochemical companies are queuing up to fund environmental organisations. Sponsoring cleanups and recycling initiatives allows them to show they are doing something about the problem, while at the same time laying the blame for it on the “irresponsible consumer”.

A comic depiction of industry tactics from Changing Markets Foundation

So why isn’t Trash Hero World playing this game? As a relatively new and fast-growing non-profit, we could certainly use the funds. Many would also argue that it makes sense to work with all players – especially big multinational companies – so that change can happen more effectively.

While we remain open to everyone, this type of financial collaboration usually only benefits the parties involved. And it can actually block progress in the wider sense. Every dollar Trash Hero might take from a plastic producer only slows down real change and real solutions. If we work together on some “green” – or greenwashing – campaign and let them take credit for being “part of the solution”, then there is no pressure or incentive to redesign packaging and delivery systems that will actually make a difference. It stays business as usual and we’ll continue to pick up their trash for decades to come.

A cleanup with brand audit in Thailand

Instead of PR and marketing campaigns, we believe that these companies’ budgets should be spent on tackling the plastic crisis at the source: their own operations. Funding organisations to do cleanups, or find new ways to recycle, will never be efficient or sufficient enough to solve the problem. To stop plastic pollution, we need to stop making plastic. Anything else is a distraction.

Trash Hero World decided from the start that we would not take any corporate funding that could compromise our values or sidetrack our goal of zero waste. We spent many years as an all-volunteer organisation because of this, slowly gaining the support of foundations and other grant-giving bodies who still support us today. Along the way, we have turned down offers from Coca-Cola, Unilever and many more, asking them to invest the money they would have given us in deposit return schemes and other real solutions.

We wrote down our terms for working with companies in our ethical funding policy, which we still use to guide all decisions on accepting sponsorship. Because of this, we remain fully independent and free to share our data with research projects such as Break Free From Plastic’s brand audit that hold polluting companies to account. And we can also look every single volunteer and supporter in the eye with a clean conscience, knowing that our activities are never funded by the producers of the trash we want to stop.

WORKING TOGETHER FOR A BETTER WORLD

Schnarwiler’s circular model

Refusing money from the plastics industry and those connected with it does not mean that we are anti-corporate per se. In fact, Trash Hero’s position on working with corporate partners is the same one we have in every area: encouraging positive action! We want to work with companies who are actively doing the right thing, rather than saying they plan to do the right thing, maybe, within 5 years.

Impact Acoustic joins a cleanup in Luzern

Companies such as Schnarwiler AG, Halm, Impact Acoustic and MIZU are demonstrating new ways of doing business that are both environmentally and socially sustainable. From the raw materials to the ability to refill or reuse the products, each is making a real contribution to a circular economy. We have found different ways to collaborate with each one and we are grateful to all for their support.

Promoting local champions in Thailand

Of course, partnerships do not have to involve money. Throughout the Trash Hero global network, our chapters freely promote businesses in their area doing their part to reduce waste. From refill shops to coffee shops that accept “bring your own” cups, we support everyone “walking the talk” to defeat plastic pollution. These local champions are living proof that zero waste is possible and – as public opinion shifts – the big companies will eventually have to follow suit. We’ll be here to celebrate them when they do.