#plastic

🇲🇾 Malaysia · Taiwan Buddhist Tzu-Chi Foundation Malaysia (Tzu Chi Malaysia)

Volunteers who have been sorting Malaysia's recyclables since 1995 marked 30 years with a 2025 plogging drive across the country.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Gollo (Grupo Unicomer)

Any customer can drop a dead fridge, phone or TV at one of about 150 Gollo stores, and last year that free take-back swelled to 495 tonnes, up 39%.

🇮🇳 India · Bay of Life Foundation

India's first accredited surf school pays coastal kids in free surf lessons for every 5kg of beach trash they collect, turning Chennai's Kovalam shoreline into a classroom for ocean literacy.

🇨🇱 Chile · Bureo

Collects discarded fishing nets and recycles them into NetPlus, a raw material used by global brands.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Bye Bye Plastic Bags

Two Balinese sisters turned a school project into a global youth movement that helped ban single-use plastic bags across Bali.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Captain Fanplastic

A pirate story that ends with children treating the litter on their own beach as treasure rather than rubbish.

🇧🇭 Bahrain · Cleanup Bahrain

What started with two friends in 2016 has grown into Bahrain's largest volunteer beach-cleanup network, hauling tens of tonnes of plastic off the Kingdom's coastline.

🇴🇲 Oman · Environment Society of Oman (ESO)

Oman's only dedicated environmental NGO organizes volunteers to strip abandoned fishing nets and marine debris from the beaches and coral reefs that ring one of the world's most important turtle rookeries.

🇮🇳 India · Waste Warriors Society

A grassroots NGO built waste-collection systems from scratch in Himalayan towns and national parks that had none, one trail and one household at a time.

🇩🇲 Dominica · WildDominique

A homegrown band of Dominican ecologists and marine biologists running beach cleanups, endangered-reptile monitoring and environmental education across the Nature Isle.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Conceptos Plásticos

A Bogotá social enterprise melts down plastic waste into Lego-like bricks that assemble into low-cost, durable classrooms and homes.

🇷🇸 Serbia · Eko straža (Eco Guard)

A volunteer-run citizen movement born on Facebook in 2019 has become one of the Balkans' loudest voices against Serbia's toxic air.

🇰🇪 Kenya · FRADI (Fraternity for Development Integrated)

A Congolese refugee who arrived in Kakuma with nothing built the camp's largest plastic recycling enterprise, turning waste into jobs.

🇶🇦 Qatar · Friends of the Environment Center

Qatar's oldest environmental NGO has spent three decades cataloguing the country's birds and wildlife while teaching a generation of schoolchildren to protect them.

🇱🇷 Liberia · Champions for Nature Conservation Liberia (CNCL)

A Monrovia-based NGO pays residents by the kilogram to sort and hand over plastic waste before it clogs the wetlands that feed the city.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · GarbageMan

A Bangladeshi social enterprise partnered with Cordaid, WFP and the Rohingya community to turn discarded food-aid sachets and plastic into sellable bags, bracelets and wallets inside Cox's Bazar's camps.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Gjenge Makers

A Nairobi factory melts down discarded plastic bags, sachets and bottle caps with sand to press paving bricks that outperform ordinary concrete.

🇪🇸 Spain · Gravity Wave

A Spanish startup paying thousands of traditional fishers to haul plastic and abandoned nets out of the Mediterranean.

🇧🇳 Brunei · Green Brunei

A youth-led platform turning Brunei's beaches and classrooms into frontlines for plastic cleanup, tree planting and climate literacy.

🇨🇾 Cyprus · Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT)

Volunteers formed in the 1980s now screen thousands of green and loggerhead turtle nests a season on North Cyprus's beaches, turning a near-silent coastline into one of the Mediterranean's nesting strongholds.

🇪🇬 Egypt · Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA)

Founded by Hurghada divers in 1992, HEPCA runs the world's largest reef-mooring network and the waste systems that keep the Red Sea's coral coast alive.

🇳🇴 Norway · In The Same Boat

International volunteers on sailboats have hauled over 1,700 tonnes of plastic off Norway's remote beaches.

🇿🇦 South Africa · African Reclaimers Organisation

The street pickers who haul most of Johannesburg's recyclable packaging to market now have their own democratic union of more than 5,500 reclaimers, and they insist on being called reclaimers, not waste pickers.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Karumbé

Uruguay's only dedicated sea turtle NGO runs two rehabilitation centers on the Atlantic coast where stranded, plastic-choked and cold-stunned turtles get a second chance.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · TURMEPA (DenizTemiz Derneği / Turkish Marine Environment Protection Association)

Turkey's first marine conservation NGO runs a fleet of waste-collection boats and has taken ocean education to millions of students nationwide.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Love The Oceans

A grassroots dive-and-research charity in Jangamo Bay is gathering the reef, fisheries and megafauna data needed to win Mozambique's first Marine Protected Area, while training local women as the district's first female scuba divers.

🇫🇷 France · Surfrider Foundation Europe

Founded by surfers in Biarritz in 1990, this network now organizes thousands of volunteer cleanups on beaches, riverbanks and seabeds across Europe every year.

🇺🇸 United States · Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore

Baltimore's googly-eyed, solar-and-water-powered trash-eating wheel that keeps the harbor clean.

🇨🇦 Canada · Ocean Legacy Foundation

Recovers marine plastic and ghost gear from Canada's coasts and recycles it into new material.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Ocean Sole

A Nairobi social enterprise carves discarded beach flip-flops into vivid sculptures, turning marine debris into income for local artisans.

🇮🇹 Italy · Ogyre

Italy's first 'fishing for litter' platform, paying fishermen to bring back the marine waste they haul up in their nets.

🇯🇵 Japan · Pirika, Inc.

A Kyoto University-born app that turns litter-picking into a visible social movement, with over 440 million pieces of trash collected worldwide.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Planet Patrol

Founded after a paddleboarder documented plastic clogging England's waterways end to end, Planet Patrol turns every paddle, swim or dog walk into citizen-science data that has logged half a million pieces of litter worldwide.

🌍 Global · Plastic Bank

Turning ocean-bound plastic into currency for the world's most vulnerable coastal communities.

🇸🇪 Sweden · Plogga

A Stockholm jogger who got tired of stepping over litter turned 'plocka upp och jogga' (pick up and jog) into plogging, a workout-meets-cleanup movement now practiced in over 100 countries.

🇸🇬 Singapore · Ocean Purpose Project

Singapore's first Blue Economy social enterprise runs monthly community beach cleanups at Pasir Ris and turns the collected ocean plastic into fuel and hydrogen.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · Stichting De Noordzee (North Sea Foundation)

For more than four decades this Dutch foundation has fought for a cleaner, wilder North Sea — and is now turning offshore wind farms into oyster reefs.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Sagarmatha Next

Turns Everest's trash into art and gets trekkers to carry pre-packed waste bags back down the mountain.

🌍 Global · Sailors for the Sea Powered by Oceana

Since 2004, Sailors for the Sea has turned sailing regattas into environmental testing grounds, certifying events worldwide through Clean Regattas -- the sport's leading sustainability standard -- to keep plastic and pollution out of the water sailors race on.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · ECOTON

A quarter-litre of water from a Brantas tributary held 1,449 microplastic particles — fifteen times what other rivers carry — and seventeen million people drink from that system.

🇧🇲 Bermuda · Keep Bermuda Beautiful (KBB)

One of Bermuda's oldest environmental nonprofits mobilizes thousands of volunteers a year for coastal cleanups that have removed over a million pounds of litter from the island since 1964.

🇹🇳 Tunisia · Tunisie Recyclage

This Tunis association turns pre-sorted household waste into a real recycling economy, from doorstep pickup to an upcycled-goods boutique in the Medina.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Sungai Watch

Bali-born environmental organization stopping river plastic from reaching the ocean with simple floating barriers and daily cleanups.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Sustainable Coastlines

Sustainable Coastlines mobilises thousands of New Zealanders to clean beaches and turns what they find into the country's only national litter database.

🇦🇺 Australia · Take 3 for the Sea

Born from surfers picking up rubbish after every session, Take 3 turned a simple habit -- take three pieces of trash off the beach -- into a global plastic-pollution movement reaching millions.

🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Te Ipukarea Society (TIS)

The Cook Islands' longest-running environmental watchdog pairs traditional raui reef closures with modern science to defend a 1.9-million-square-kilometre ocean nation.

🇹🇭 Thailand · WWF Thailand

In Surat Thani, WWF is helping a Saleng Association of informal tricycle-and-sidecar waste collectors sign formal MoUs with junk shops so the shops owe the collectors incentives.

🇰🇪 Kenya · The Flipflopi Project

A traditional Kenyan dhow built from 10 tonnes of ocean plastic and 30,000 flip-flops sails East Africa's coast to prove single-use plastic can become a boat, a bus stop or a school desk.

🌍 Global · International Alliance of Waste Pickers

A democratic global union of 59 waste picker organisations in 38 countries took its members' demands for a just transition all the way to the UN plastics treaty talks in Geneva.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · The Great Bubble Barrier

Dutch company using curtains of bubbles to stop plastic in rivers and canals without blocking boats or wildlife.

🇿🇦 South Africa · The Litterboom Project NPC

Since 2017, floating booms across KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape rivers have intercepted more than 2.5 million kilograms of plastic before it reaches the sea.

🌍 Global · The Ocean Cleanup

Dutch nonprofit deploying ocean systems and river Interceptors to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

🇰🇼 Kuwait · Eco Star

A young engineer's plant-for-plastic swap turned into Kuwait's grassroots answer to a country where 90% of waste still lands in landfill.

🌍 Global · Trash Hero World

A volunteer movement born on a Thai beach that has run over 25,000 cleanups and removed millions of kilos of trash.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Trashy Bags Africa

A Ghanaian sewing workshop turns the drinking-water sachets that choke Accra's gutters and beaches into bags, wallets and accessories, paying collectors and seamstresses for waste most people just step over.

🇮🇳 India · Afroz Shah

The world's largest beach cleanup, started single-handedly by Mumbai lawyer Afroz Shah in 2015.

🇪🇬 Egypt · VeryNile

Egypt's grassroots initiative paying Nile fishermen fair wages to fish plastic instead of dwindling catch.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · VietCycle

Hanoi-based VietCycle has grown a network of Vietnam's ve chai scrap collectors, mostly women, from 1,200 to about 3,000 by giving them protective gear, bicycles and social insurance.

🌍 Global · Let's Do It World

One day a year, tens of millions of people in 190 countries clean up waste together in the world's biggest civic action.