#recycling

🇲🇾 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.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Masjid Al-Muharram Brajan

After blackouts sometimes silenced the call to prayer, a village mosque near Yogyakarta raised tens of millions of rupiah in 'energy alms' from thousands of small donors and switched to the sun.

🇨🇷 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%.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Донирај компјутер (Donate a Computer)

What began in 2016 as one programmer repairing old PCs in Kavadarci has grown into a volunteer network that hands refurbished computers to families who cannot afford one.

🇺🇸 United States · Access Fund

A national climbers' organization turns crag days into conservation days, rallying volunteers for litter clean-ups, trail work and land purchases that keep climbing areas wild.

🇦🇷 Argentina · FACCyR (Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores)

In August 2025 FACCyR president Sergio Sánchez chained himself to Buenos Aires' Public Space Ministry and went on hunger strike to restore the transport that gets recycling families to work.

🇨🇿 Czechia · Arnika

A Prague-based watchdog whose lab testing of toxic chemicals in everyday products has driven Czech and EU-wide policy change.

🇺🇸 United States · Blue Star Recyclers

A Colorado nonprofit recycler where most employees are autistic or otherwise disabled, proving ethical e-waste recycling and inclusive employment go hand in hand.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Asociación Cooperativa de Recicladores de Bogotá (ARB)

Founded by waste pickers from Bogotá's dump in 1990, the ARB still negotiates directly with the city and now fights for recyclers' social protection under Colombia's new Decree 0271 of 2026.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis (MNCR)

When a catadora from the MNCR's national coordination handed the presidential sash to Lula in 2023, it was the culmination of a movement that began with a 1,700-person congress in a Brasília hall.

🇨🇱 Chile · Bureo

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

🇪🇬 Egypt · Zabaleen Syndicate

When reverse vending machines that pay phone credit for bottles appeared in Giza in August 2026, Cairo's garbage collectors took the fight to live television and got the right to empty the machines themselves.

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan · Technic Destroy (First Recycling)

In a small Almaty industrial park, a firm that began shredding office electronics in 2009 now turns spent lithium-ion batteries into black mass in what Almaty officials call the only such plant in Central Asia.

🇨🇱 Chile · ANARCH (Asociación Nacional de Recicladores de Chile)

Since Chile's extended-producer-responsibility law took effect, ANARCH has helped grassroots recyclers go from loose street collectors to 47 registered cooperatives with balers and electric tricycles.

🇧🇭 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.

🇮🇳 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.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Conceptos Plásticos

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

🇧🇪 Belgium · NGO Shipbreaking Platform

A European shipowner can sell a worn-out vessel to a cash buyer, watch it be renamed and reflagged mid-voyage, and never legally have sent anything to a beach in South Asia.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Bokk Diom Association

Bokk Diom's 1,300 pickers, who have worked West Africa's biggest dump for decades, stopped Dakar's garbage trucks in 2023 and are now demanding a just transition as the World Bank-financed closure of Mbeubeuss proceeds.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Nipe Fagio

In one Dar es Salaam ward, waste picker cooperatives run door-to-door collection that diverts 95% of waste from disposal, and the NGO behind it helped launch a national waste pickers' association.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Bangladesh Waste Pickers Union (BWPU)

Dumpsite pickers around Dhaka's Matuail landfill, led by women, have formed a union demanding to be legally recognised as environmental workers.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Eco-Soap Bank

Discarded hotel soap bars that would otherwise go straight to landfill are sanitized, reprocessed and given to families who can't afford basic hygiene products.

🇮🇱 Israel · Ecology for a Protected Community (אקולוגיה לקהילה מוגנת)

A Galilee e-waste recycling company where three in four employees have a physical, cognitive, or sensory disability, turning discarded electronics into dignified careers.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · RENAREC (Red Nacional de Recicladores del Ecuador)

Led by Quito recycler Elbia Pisuña, who began sorting at age 14, RENAREC speaks for a workforce that recovers around 90,000 tonnes of material a year.

🇦🇺 Australia · Erub Arts

On a tiny Torres Strait island, Indigenous artists weave thousands of abandoned fishing nets into internationally exhibited sculptures that fight ocean plastic and keep sea culture alive.

🇰🇪 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.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Global Fashion Agenda

Cambodia's garment sector throws away an estimated 140,000 tonnes of textile waste a year, and a partnership launched in Phnom Penh in 2025 is teaching 50 factories to sort and sell it instead.

🌍 Global · Pure Earth

A backyard where car batteries are melted down looks like nothing at all — which is why roughly a billion children carry lead in their blood and almost nobody is looking for the source.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Forest Green Rovers FC

An English football club runs its stadium on solar power, feeds fans a vegan menu and became the world's first UN-certified carbon-neutral sports team.

🇱🇷 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.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Bounce Back Recycling

A Galway social enterprise dismantles mattresses by hand and has kept 50,000 of them out of Irish landfills and ditches since 2017.

🇧🇩 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.

🇺🇬 Uganda · Generous Designs Africa

South Sudanese refugee youth and single mothers in Uganda's Bidibidi settlement turn discarded plastic and aid tarpaulins into waterproof bags and household goods.

🇰🇪 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.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · Impactlution

In Selangor, women's craft groups wash, crush and cast used wine and beer bottles into glass-sand planters, trays and coasters, in a country where glass recycling sits near 10%.

🇧🇳 Brunei · Green Brunei

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

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Istanbul Recycling Workers' Association (Geri Donusum Iscileri Dernegi)

Istanbul's recycling workers, who by the president's account collect 80 percent of Turkey's household waste, have organised their own association and are now issuing members ID cards and numbered depots under municipal rules.

🇿🇦 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.

🇯🇵 Japan · Zero Waste Academy (Kamikatsu)

A mountain town of 1,500 people sorts every scrap of trash into 45 categories at a communal station, recycling more waste than almost anywhere on Earth.

🇺🇸 United States · Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana

Shucked oyster shells that used to go to landfill are hauled back to the coast in mesh bags, where they seed new reefs that break the waves eating Louisiana's salt marsh.

🇦🇿 Azerbaijan · IDEA – International Dialogue for Environmental Action

A Baku-based youth-powered NGO has planted more than five million trees across Azerbaijan and mobilized volunteers for coastal cleanups and recycling drives since 2011.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Hinckley Recycling

Hinckley turns the 100,000-strong army of informal e-waste scavengers around Lagos into trained, protected, paid collectors, and is building Nigeria's first lead-acid and lithium battery recycling lines.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Ocean Sole

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

🇯🇵 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.

🇸🇪 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.

🌍 Global · Precious Plastic

An open-source movement giving anyone the blueprints to build their own plastic recycling workshop.

🇮🇳 India · SWaCH Pune Seva Sahakari Sanstha

A wholly worker-owned cooperative of Pune's waste pickers now walks into roughly one million properties a day, collecting the city's waste door to door.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Re-Cycle

A UK charity rescues unwanted bicycles from British landfill, ships them by the container-load to African partners, and puts low-carbon transport into the hands of rural communities.

🇦🇹 Austria · Re-Use Austria

A national umbrella group of Austrian repair cafes and reuse shops is proving that fixing things instead of binning them can create real jobs, not just save the planet.

🌍 Global · Repair Café International Foundation

Started at a single Amsterdam gathering in 2009, Repair Café's free community workshops now teach people to mend belongings in over 30 countries.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Sagarmatha Next

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

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Shambala Festival

This Northamptonshire music festival banned single-use plastic, went meat-and-dairy-free and now plants its own woodland every year, proving a multi-day festival can also be a climate project.

🇧🇲 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.

🇸🇰 Slovakia · AfB Slovakia

AfB Slovakia wipes, repairs and resells corporate laptops and phones with a 96% reuse rate, and in doing so employs people with health disabilities.

🇹🇳 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.

🇵🇭 Philippines · EcoWaste Coalition

Grown out of the campaign that won the Philippines' Clean Air Act, this coalition now battles the backyard trash fires that keep filling Filipino neighborhoods with toxic smoke.

🇳🇿 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.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · TRAID

A London charity collects unwanted clothes from over 700 clothing banks and free home pickups, reselling and recycling them to keep fashion out of landfill.

🌍 Global · TerraCycle

Trenton-based company that recycles the 'unrecyclable' — from cigarette butts to cosmetics packaging — across 18 countries.

🇹🇭 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.

🇪🇪 Estonia · Reet Aus

Tallinn designer Reet Aus builds whole clothing collections from the 18% of fabric that factories normally cut away and throw out.

🌍 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.

🇿🇦 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.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Young Power in Social Action

Dead ships are run at full speed onto the beach at Chattogram and cut up where they lie, by men with blowtorches standing in asbestos and oil residue.

🇬🇭 Ghana · The Or Foundation

Fights fast fashion's 'waste colonialism' from inside Accra's Kantamanto, the world's largest secondhand clothing market.

🌍 Global · Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

An incinerator is usually sold to a city as the modern answer to its rubbish, and it is almost always built next to the poorest neighbourhood — which is why the network fighting them is made of waste pickers.

🇰🇼 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.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Plan Ceibal

Plan Ceibal, the agency that put a computer in the hands of every Uruguayan schoolchild, handles just 1% of the country's imported electronics yet accounts for 14% of the e-waste Uruguay actually processes.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · UCRUS (Unión de Clasificadores de Residuos Urbanos Sólidos)

On 17 September 2025 Uruguay's wage councils created Subgroup 6.3, giving the people who collect and sort commercial and industrial waste a labor and wage framework for the first time.

🇻🇳 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.

🇰🇪 Kenya · WEEE Centre

East Africa's licensed e-waste recycler dismantles old phones, computers and appliances in Nairobi so toxic components never reach landfill or open dumps.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Waste4Change

Waste4Change is an Indonesian social enterprise that collects, sorts, and recycles household and commercial waste to divert it from landfills.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Wecyclers

Cargo-bike collectors reward Lagos households with points and prizes for their recyclable waste.

🌍 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.

🇨🇲 Cameroon · National Union of Scrap Metal Workers (SYNAFSEC)

Cameroon's scrap metal workers' union and the ILO cleared a derelict Yaoundé site in 2026 by dismantling 75 end-of-life buses and minibuses in two weeks, bringing protective equipment and safety training to more than 150 informal workers.