Over the summer, I volunteered at Wat Chak Daeng to clean out trash from the Chao Phraya River. I didn’t think much of it until I went in and saw the severity of the situation—plastic was continuously flowing into the river from smaller waterways. This ignited a fire in me to take action to form the upcycle project. This waste management project aims to reduce plastic waste and support local communities by working with locals to process and recycle plastic waste into goods of higher value. 

I am one of the five founding members of an upcycle team alongside Win, Rocco, Gain, and Pan. Since the beginning of 2024, we have set up five plastic trash cans around the school to collect plastic waste. These cans are regularly sent to Wat Jak Daeng, a renowned Buddhist temple in Bangkok, which processes these plastic bottles into fabrics and other goods of higher value, such as blankets, t-shirts, bags, and other essentials. 

Alongside this campaign, we also set up online and in-person fundraising events at school to raise money to pay for these processes. We got our products to the market through various pathways such as email, LINE, and physical selling. This project not only taught me about collaboration and working with different organizations, but I also learned to manage a store and customers. We successfully sold our products in person during the Chinese New Year fair. Selling our bags through Gmail and LINE was far less efficient.