Rubbish reward

Recognition for innovative Thai recycler A pioneer of organised recycling in Thailand has won a Worldaware Business Award for his Wongpanit Garbage Recycle Separation Plant, which sends glass bottles to food factories, wood to furniture makers and iron and steel to a foundry. It also roasts coconut husks - a major nuisance because coconuts are a popular food - to make activated carbon for wastewater treatment and pencil making, and encourages Thais to compost food and vegetable waste. Traditionally, recycling in Thailand involves ingenuity at the individual level, making new items from old in hundreds of ways. Empty food oil cans, for instance, can be transformed into dustpans by cutting them in half and attaching handles. But Dr Somthai Wongcharoen works on a wider scale. He has 500 families collecting rubbish for his 49 branches in northern Thailand and one in neighbouring Laos, and the recently opened £750,000 Wongpanit recycling plant processes 80-100 tonnes of waste a day. Newsreader Jon Snow, who presented the award at London’s Royal Society, described it as “something that would be the envy of many towns and boroughs in the developed world”. Other winners in this year’s Worldaware awards included Brebner School Chalk, the first chalk factory in central Africa, which provides 96 jobs in rural Zambia making blackboard chalk from locally-mined gypsum, and the Abebech Gobena Orphanage and School in Ethiopia, which trains orphans and destitute children for careers such as plumbing, weaving and catering, as well as providing credit for women with small businesses and running reproductive health programmes. - Alison Winward

14 March 2004

Alison Winward