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. 
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Amelia Meier2 Years and 100 Cleanups in Ao Nang

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!

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Amelia MeierTrash Hero Alex’s Birthday

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

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Amelia MeierAmazing Video by Trash Hero Myanmar

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!

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Amelia MeierPlanting Mangroves on Langkawi

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!

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Amelia MeierTrash Hero Shanghai’s First Cleanup

A 9-year old Trash Hero from China

by Amelia Meier on 29/09/2016 No comments
September 26, 2016 – Trash Hero China in the making?
Constance is 9 years old and lives in China. Together with her mother, she recently cleaned up on the Great Wall of China. Her inspiration had been the pictures of weekly cleanups coming from Trash Hero Hua Hin (Thailand), and she therefore decided to do the same in China for a day.
If everyone did their little part like Constance we would be facing a far less littered world than we are now. Thank you Constance & mother for the inspiration!
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Amelia MeierA 9-year old Trash Hero from China

90 NGOs with a vision of the future free from plastic

by Amelia Meier on 14/09/2016 1 comment

14 September 2016 – Trash Hero World

Trash Hero World is proud to be among a group of 90 NGOs, who just laid out a groundbreaking new global vision for a future free from plastic pollution. The vision lays out 10 principles. This represents the first step in a global movement to change society’s perception and use of plastics.

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Amelia Meier90 NGOs with a vision of the future free from plastic

Trash Heroes on Water

by Amelia Meier on 15/06/2016 No comments

15 June 2016 – Trash Hero Bangkok

During our first cleanup in Bangkok just recently some of our Trash Heroes took to the water and collected trash while on standup paddle boards. How awesome is that?

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Amelia MeierTrash Heroes on Water

Collaboration with Peduli Alam

by Amelia Meier on 03/06/2016 No comments

Meaning “Protect Nature” in Indonesian, Peduli Alam was created in 2008 by French citizens and Bali lovers Charlotte Fredouille and Laetitia Girouxas  as an NGO specialising in waste management and collection in Amed, on Bali’s beautiful East coast. Among its many activities, the organisation organises awareness campaigns at schools and villages educating about waste management. The Balinese nature suffers from over-use of plastics, and locals – often poorly educated villagers (farmers and fishermen) – are not aware of the consequences of burning plastics and/or throwing these away carelessly into rivers or the ocean.

Outside cities and developed tourist areas (that represent only 10% of the island), there is often no garbage collection organised by the government. The objective of Peduli Alam therefore is to raise awareness of the results from incineration or disposal of garbage in nature. For this, Peduli Alam provides simple solutions: they build big trash bins along the coast so locals can dispose of their inorganic trash. Peduli Alam’s team then collects trash several times per month, and bring the trash to a sorting station.

Peduli Alam has collaborated with the Trash Hero Amed chapter from the very beginning in May 2015. They’re an indispensable, loyal and highly effective partner: Trash Hero Amed organises the beach clean-ups and collects rubbish with volunteers, and Peduli Alam does everything else. They supply trash bags, sticks, and gloves and, most importantly, transport the trash collected to the sorting station. Beyond that, Peduli Alam keeps part of that trash to transform it into ecobricks (see here for additional information) as well as bags made of recycled plastic.

Follow Peduli Alam here on Facebook.

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Amelia MeierCollaboration with Peduli Alam

Trash Hero Pattani’s Record-Breaking

by Amelia Meier on 01/06/2016 No comments

01 June, 2016 – Trash Hero Pattani (Thailand)

Trash Hero Pattani have just completed their “Clean Up #12”, and have broken various records doing so. First off, 140 (yes, that’s one-hundred-and-forty!) Trash Heroes showed up: 5 from the governor team, 15 heroes, and 120 from from มหาวิทยาลัยสงขลานครินทร์ (the Prince of Songkhla University).

For this cleanup, they went once again to Laem Ta Chi Cape, where they’d cleaned up before and felt like they hadn’t made much of an impact. Altogether they gathered 430kg (yes, that’s four-hundred-and-thirty!) of trash. 75kg alone were broken glass and bottles, a total of 20kg were flip flops, and the rest was made up of all types of plastic packaging and fishing equipment. All the while they educated participants on waste management, and had a lot of fun.

It’s been three months since Trash Hero Pattani got going. 431 heroes in total have participated, 1856.3 kg have been collected, and there is no end in sight!

Trash Hero Pattani are amazing (follow them here on Facebook), and we are so proud to count them as part of this movement. What’s more, they have been able to obtain support from the Chief Administrator of SAO, whose kind help contributes to making this effort a great one.

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Amelia MeierTrash Hero Pattani’s Record-Breaking