#recycling

🇨🇿 Czechia · Arnika

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

🇨🇱 Chile · Bureo

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

🇧🇭 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.

🇸🇱 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.

🇦🇺 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.

🇱🇷 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.

🇰🇪 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.

🇧🇳 Brunei · Green Brunei

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

🇯🇵 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.

🇦🇿 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.

🇰🇪 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.

🌍 Global · Precious Plastic

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

🇦🇹 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.

🇧🇲 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.

🇵🇭 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.

🇿🇦 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.

🇬🇭 Ghana · The Or Foundation

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

🇰🇼 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.

🇰🇪 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.