Change doesn’t start with promises. It starts with people who show up.
Every week, Trash Hero volunteers take action in their communities – to clean, educate and change the way people view, handle and prevent waste. This year, we were active in 95 locations in 14 countries (Cambodia, Czech Republic, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Myanmar, Serbia, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, USA, and Vietnam).
After collating the data logged globally during 2025, we’re proud to share what we achieved together in this short video:
Below, we break down the impact of each of our core programmes.
Action and Awareness
In 2025 alone, Trash Hero volunteers organised 2,071 community cleanups, mobilising 37,089 volunteers, including 10,922 under 16s. Together, they collected 115.1 tonnes of trash.
This brings the total impact of our Action and Awareness programme from December 2013 to December 2025 to:
- 25,378 cleanups organised
- 599,248 volunteers mobilised (including 165,842 under 16s)
- 2,716,807 kg of trash collected
Trash Hero Communities
Thanks to their consistent and reliable action, our volunteers are often given opportunities to share their knowledge and perspectives on waste. This includes giving educational presentations, supporting zero-waste events, or joining policy discussions. In 2025, Trash Hero volunteers organised or participated in 237 community events, engaging 14,425 people in the issues surrounding plastic pollution and the actions needed to solve it.
Since 2022, Trash Hero volunteers have engaged 40,110 people in 700 such events.
Our Trash Hero Communities programme also includes our water refill network, which currently consists of 584 participating businesses. In 2025 alone, they have prevented the use of 1.8 million single-use plastic bottles and 98 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Since the project began, it has:
- distributed 113,088 reusable water bottles
- avoided 44.3 million single-use plastic bottles and 2,318 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Kids and Education
Our Trash Hero Kids programme engages primary school children in the stewardship of their environment, using a story and activity book to support long term behavioural change. In 2025, 629 new kids enrolled in the programme. We also ran 59 events for kids, introducing 6,856 under 16s to the critical issues of plastic pollution. We started logging these events in 2022; since then we have held a total of 298 kids’ events, involving 21,366 children.
Thank you to everyone over the years who has joined, organised, donated, shared, and believed. You are a vital part of our movement.
We hope you’ll join us again in 2026.
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