Zero Waste Communities volunteer training

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.