ag Line
Help us raise more awareness on plastic and waste management and help our community to build a more eco-friendly incinerator to dispose of waste in a cleaner way.
Mission
To build a waste incinerator for Chan Thnal High School, Kampong Speu province: a rapidly-developing town 60 km from the capital with no municipal waste collection. To run waste workshops and encourage participants to change their waste management habits; reduce and burn their waste in the incinerator we will build for them.
Ultimate Goal
To construct a waste incinerator for the Chan Thnal community and train 200 Chan Thnal high school students and locals on waste management and how to use and maintain the incinerator through workshops. We know that changing people’s habits is not easy. That is why we are collaborating with Chan Thnal High School, so the board of directors can help us monitor participation in the project. In the end, we will write a report on this project to inspire others to replicate this project in other areas that experience the same problem.
Why you should support us
Waste management is a global issue, but particularly in developing countries. In Cambodia, there is no municipal waste collection in most areas of the country. We see trash in the streets practically everywhere we go. With limited options, many Cambodians choose to burn their trash in open fires next to their house, resulting in polluting their surrounding environment and adversely harming health. The photo above shows an open burning site at Chan Thnal high school which is located right by a classroom window, with smoke sometimes entering the class. Closing windows is not an option since there are no air conditioners in government schools in this tropical country.
On the other hand, burning trash in an incinerator, with high heat, will burn the waste effectively which will be less polluting. Our goal is not only to help students but also to inspire a more lasting impact.
Many other waste management projects are clean-ups, where waste is collected on the streets and disposed of. However, where it goes after that is sometimes the real problem. How we hope to be different is to do what many other projects do not do: deal with the waste in a permanent way. We hope you see the significance of our project, stand with our mission, and support us.
Our Progress and How You Can Help
So far, we have led a group of high school students to create the content for our workshops. We are translating the manual for the building and maintaining the incinerator. We need your help in the form of funding to execute our plan and build an incinerator at Chan Thnal. Please read below to see how your funds will be used.
Who are we?
We are Somphors and Sythong, 17 and 18 years old respectively. Moved by our passion for making a cleaner and healthier environment, we teamed up to start the Community Cleanup Campaign. Our team aims to promote domestic waste reduction and proper management through educational workshops and waste cleanup projects. Somphors grew up in Chan Thnal. There, he witnessed the drastic transformation in his hometown. An isolated community, around 15 kilometers from Kampong Speu city, has now become a living area with many development plans. More people are living in Chan Thnal which increases the amount of waste produced. Somphors’ mother has a vendor shop in Chan Thnal high school. She sells breakfast, snacks, and drinks to students. Because there is no proper facility for burning trash, so every evening, sellers would burn their trash behind the school buildings. Nevertheless, this school has tried various ways to decrease the use of plastic, they encourage students to use reusable water bottles, plant leaves to pack food, and even make a burning facility (as shown in the photo above). Their effort started the momentum for becoming more environmentally conscious and will make it easier for collaboration between Chan Thnal high school and our campaign. We have a very promising lasting impact. We want to create change by starting small with this project. We are hoping to work with Chan Thnal High School in Kampong Speu province as a pilot project. We plan to also write a short paper on this project with the possibility of expanding it to other parts of Cambodia.
Future Plans
We are piloting this project to see the impact we can make and will be collecting all the information and writing a report to inspire others to do the same. We believe that this can be a template to be used anywhere in Cambodia or in the developing world.
About the Incinerator
The incinerator we are using is the De Montfort Medical Waste Incinerator Mark 8A Model designed by Professor D.J. Picken. This design is perfect for addressing SDG goal number six of Clean water and sanitation and has been approved and distributed by WHO, MSF, the British Council, UNICEF, the Salvation Army, and Technology Without Borders. With this model we chose, it has the capacity to burn 12 kilograms of trash per hour. The basis of how an incinerator works is that it burns waste at a higher heat (than open burning), through the process of gasification, toxic gases like dioxin can’t be formed. With this incinerator, we can introduce a better way for people to burn their waste to improve their living environment.
