It all started with a simple realization—plastic pollution was everywhere. Beaches, streets, even places where nature should be untouched. I had always known it was a problem, but seeing it firsthand during our CAS project, Towers of Change: From Beaches to Classrooms, made it personal.

I remember the day we drove to Bang Saen Beach, our car loaded with gloves, litter pick-up sticks, and trash bags. It was supposed to be a beautiful shoreline, yet plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and bottle caps were scattered everywhere, mixed in with seashells and sand. It was overwhelming. I picked up a plastic straw buried in the sand, wondering how long it had been there. A few minutes? Days? Years? The thought was unsettling. Working alongside Jack and Andy, we collected bags full of plastic waste, each piece a small victory against pollution. As exhausting as it was, there was a strange sense of satisfaction in seeing the beach slowly transform. But we knew that cleaning up wasn’t enough—we needed to educate others about the issue.

So, we took our project into the classroom. I spent hours gathering data, visuals, and real-life examples for our 30-page presentation, determined to make the students understand why this mattered. On the day of the session, standing in front of a group of middle schoolers, I felt nervous. Would they care? Would they listen? To my relief, they did. Their eyes widened when I showed them a graph of plastic production skyrocketing from zero in 1950 to 400 million tonnes in 2019. They gasped at images of seabirds choking on plastic and turtles trapped in bottle rings.

And then came the fun part—building towers out of the plastic we had collected. Watching them compete to build the tallest structure made me realize something: this was more than just a lesson. It was a moment of change.