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Trash Hero at TEDxYangon

by Leslie Finlay on 23/06/2017 No comments

MAY 21, 2017: YANGON, MYANMAR

Trash Hero Myanmar Coordinator Phone Kyaw Moe Myint, who goes by Carl, tells the audience at TEDxYangon about the words that changed his life: “Become a Trash Hero.”

The sailing champion has spent his life on the water, and admits that he hadn’t truly considered the problem of pollution very much until it directly impacted his life – a tendency he criticizes too many of us are guilty of, but understands all the same. Then the waters of his Inya Lake became so overrun with trash that it threatened his beloved sport and livelihood.

Since that day, Carl is a firm believer in Trash Hero’s global movement of mobilizing the hands and hearts of individuals to enable change. In his talk, he champions the power of building awareness and influencing others through small behavioral changes – that together we can solve the global garbage crisis.

His words are dedicated the more than 20,000 heroes out there! Check out his speech below.

Myanmar Coordinator on the Cover of MYANMORE Magazine

by Leslie Finlay on 16/06/2017 No comments

16 June 2017 – Trash Hero Myanmar

In its inaugural year, Phone Kyaw Moe Myint (Carl) led Trash Hero Myanmar to meet some impressive goals. The multiple Southeast Asian gold-medal winning sailor has had a lifelong love affair with his local Inya Lake, but now as a coach and mentor to Myanmar’s next generation of athletes, he takes its preservation even more seriously.

In its June 2017 issue – just one year after the chapter’s founding – MYANMORE Magazine featured Carl on its cover heralding his immense contributions to the country as an athlete, businessman, and now as a Trash Hero.

The article chronicles some of the chapter’s awesome achievements in the last 12 months:

Carl promoted Trash Hero at TEDx Yangon – May 21, 2017
Trash Hero Myanmar now functions in four cities** – Yangon, Mandalay, Ngwe Saung beach and Pyin Oo Lwin – with events scheduled monthly. Enthusiasm may drive weekly events soon, however.
Altogether the chapters boast more than 5,000 heroes and have removed more than 20,000 kg of trash
The Yangon chapter has cleared nearly 2,000 kg of waste from Inya Lake alone (using paddle boards!)
Following the successful TEDx, Trash Hero is working with City Mart to reduce the company’s plastic bag usage
Carl is systematically removing plastics from the Inya Lake Sailing Club and from the Vantage Tower (his office)

**Since the article, the beautiful mountain city Lashio has joined the Trash Hero family as well!

Read the full MYANMORE Magazine article below.

Happy and motivated Heroes on Koh Samui

by Amelia Meier on 09/03/2017 2 comments

9 March 2017 – Trash Hero Koh Samui

Our friends of Trash Hero Koh Samui have just produced an awesome video showing how much fun goes into the activities they do. See it here. Keep up the good work guys!

Aeschbacher is a Hero, Too!

by Amelia Meier on 08/03/2017 No comments

8 March 2017 – Trash Hero World

Tonight we had the honour of being invited to Swiss talk show “Aeschbacher”. Trash Hero (and one of our Founders) Roman Peter did a fantastic job in giving viewers a short introduction into the organisation… and found a fellow Trash Hero in the moderator, Swiss TV legend Kurt Aeschbacher.

The show will be broadcast this Sunday, 12 March 2017 at 22.05 CEST on SRF1. See the full program description here, and tune in on Sunday.

2 Years and 100 Cleanups in Ao Nang

by Amelia Meier on 26/02/2017 No comments

26 February 2017 – Trash Hero Ao Nang (Thailand)

This months marks two important milestones for Trash Hero Ao Nang: In the first week they celebrated their two-year anniversary, and now they’ve just completed their 100th cleanup!

In the words Seema, one of our most dedicated Trash Heros: “We have cleaned every week of those 2 years, with breaks only when the weather was so bad we couldn’t go out, or when major public holidays got in the way. Oddly, a lot of people still ask us why we do it. They ask us why w bother, when the trash is there again the next week. First off, we clean because we CAN. Why not do something good for our planet, if you can? Secondly, we do it because there is no better way of “educating” people about the impact of trash than to take them up and get them to pick it up. Our volunteers come from local communities, schools, or are tourists. They all experience first hand where litter goes, and they take that experience home. We’ve seen a change in behaviour in almost everybody who cleaned with us. It changes you.

Lastly, with weekly cleanups we make sure the issue of waste and its disposal is kept at the forefront of the local agenda. “Behind the scenes”, we’re constantly working on building relationships and creating positive, long-term solutions for the prevention of waste, because in the long run we have to stop producing it. These things however take time and “results” are not easy to show, but attitudes are definitely changing!”

THANK YOU to Trash Hero Ao Nang, all volunteers who have participated in cleanups there, and everyone who has supported their journey thus far and is eager to fulfill the mission of a cleaner Krabi – and a cleaner world.

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.

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

Trash Hero Thailand in the News Again

by Amelia Meier on 04/01/2017 No comments

03 January 2016 – Trash Hero Thailand

Trash Hero Thailand has made it onto the news again, with a wonderful contribution aired on Thairath TV. See it here! Thairath TV covered Trash Hero Bangkok (and a lot of our dedicated Trash Heroes from that chapter) and Trash Hero Thailand, and is a wonderful reference for the work Trash Heroes are doing in Thailand.

Fun fact: Thairath has 1 million followers on youtube, and 7 million likes on Facebook. So how better to reach a lot of people than this?

Ban Krut Launches Bottles

by Amelia Meier on 03/01/2017 1 comment

03 January 2017 – Trash Hero Ban Krut

Trash Hero Ban Krut has just launched the Trash Hero bottle. One more location in Thailand that has now joined! Bottles can now be purchased for 200 Baht, and those with a bottle in hand can then get free refills at the water stations at the Siriphong Guesthouse and the Gecko Bar Ban Krut (Gecko Bar Bankrut). OR, at any other one of the refill stations across Thailand.

The Trash Hero Bottle program aims to substantially reduce the amount of plastic bottles that end up on the beaches, in the sea, and in our communities by providing reusable replacements which not only benefit the environment, but also save those who own one money. Since March 2016, around 4000 litres of water have been bottled at the water station at Siriphong Guesthouse and the Gecko Bar. This means that more than 2600 plastic bottles (1.5l) have been saved… or 8000 bottles if we are counting in 0.5l bottles.

One Happy New Year Resolution

by Amelia Meier on 01/01/2017 No comments

01 January 2016 – Trash Hero World

Wishing you all a happy, healthy, and plastic-straw-free 2017! We feel humbled by the growth of this movement, and look forward to continuing on in 2017 to make our world a better place for next generations.

Many thanks to our amazing Trash Hero Valérie Derbaudrenghien for this awesome little poster.