Update | Trash Hero World

Trash Hero submits proposal for the Global Plastics Treaty to UN Environmental Programme

by Lydia on 15/01/2023 No comments

Trash Hero World has submitted a proposal to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) ahead of the second session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-2) to develop a Global Plastics Treaty.

We worked together with Break Free from Plastic to submit the statement, which addresses the potential elements for the treaty and outlines a plan for dealing with plastic pollution in all environments. Drafted by their policy experts, its key objectives focus on the removal of unnecessary plastics that jeopardise the environment, while ensuring that the planet and its inhabitants are protected. Control measures should cover each stage of the plastic lifecycle – from raw material extraction to product production, waste management, and leakage into the environment. Some of the recommendations include stopping harmful chemicals and plastics, reducing the use of virgin materials and transitioning to a circular economy.

As stated by the UN Special Rapporteur, a human-rights-based approach must be adopted in the management of reducing global plastics. This means ensuring social justice for waste pickers and other workers in the global plastics value chain and environmental justice for communities that have been unfairly impacted by plastic pollution.

Trash Hero World was granted formal consultative status at the United Nations Environmental Assembly in March 2022. As an official observer, we are now among 500+ NGOs globally that can give input to policy discussions and participate in the UNEA sessions and those of its subsidiary bodies. Our proposal is one among around 200 that are publicly available on the UNEP website (under the “Pre-Session Submissions” tab). These proposals will be reviewed for inclusion in the official documentation provided to the negotiating committee at the INC-2 summit in Paris in May this year.

In November 2022, the five-year Brand Audit Report was submitted to the INC-1. Trash Hero was a major contributor of data to the study.

Using our platform to advocate for the reduction of plastic production and the adoption of zero waste systems is an important part of our ongoing commitment to “act local but think global”. By engaging with UNEP, and other key stakeholders, we hope to drive change and create a cleaner and more equitable world for future generations. We are proud to work alongside Break Free From Plastic in this goal.

Trash Hero World joined the Break Free From Plastic movement in 2018. Since then, we have collaborated on several important projects that aim to reduce plastic pollution worldwide, including being a top contributor to data in their annual Brand Audit reports.

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.

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

Trash Hero Thailand Gains Support from Tourism Authority

by Amelia Meier on 11/01/2017 No comments

11 January 2017 – Trash Hero Thailand

Trash Hero Thailand chapters Bangkok and Koh Samui are proud to have been able to connect with the Governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Together, we aim to reduce the use of plastic bags, bottles, and other waste, in order to protect our environment for future generations.

@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.

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.