• Society

Plastic-for-Rice Campaign to Promote Plastic-Free Villages on the Tonle Sap Lake

• By Isa Rohany
• April 9, 2023 6:30 PM

SIEM REAP – A campaign to promote plastic-free lifestyle has been launched to encourage the communities on the Tonle Sap Lake in Siem Reap province to manage their household plastic wastes.

Sea Sophal, director of the Bamboo Shoot Foundation, said that the organization is working in cooperation with the local authorities as well as young-people groups to run the “Harvesting Plastics” campaign whose goals include teaching people of the Tonle Sap communities how to manage plastic waste.

As Sophal explained, the campaign, which will run until June, was launched on April 8 so that people can be reminded of properly handling plastic waste at Khmer New Year held in mid-April and during which families will celebrate over several days and many major events will take place. All this, as the water level on the Tonle Sap lake is low and the water on the lake and the Tonle Sap river is not flowing at full capacity, Sophal said.

The purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness of the importance of plastic waste storage for clean lifestyle among people in the Tonle Sap community, as well as to enable them, as an incentive, to compete to receive milled rice as prize if they become role-model households for the community, he said. 

The local authorities will be evaluating the households by personally visiting each one every week to monitor their handling of plastic waste and to give them bags in which to store their plastic wastes instead of throwing them in the lake.

For this year’s campaign, 10 tons of milled rice is needed to distribute to people. However, the difference with the 2022 campaign is that this year, not every household will get rice immediately or right after the meeting, Sophal said.  

“They will have to clean their house, store plastic waste properly, and help collect waste,” he said. “They will have to earn the title of role model within the village through the evaluation.”

The purpose of making this a competition is to encourage people of the community to put their heart into it and make them used to dispose of plastics this way in the hope that they will continue to do so after the campaign is over, Sophal said.  

Women young and old work together to collect plastic garbage caught in vegetation along the Tonle Sap Lake. Photo: Chris Hall 

According to him, there are two remaining challenges that the community and the Bamboo Shoot Foundation face when it comes to collecting plastic waste: inadequate infrastructure and the quantity of waste.

By April 6, the working group in Peam Ta Our village had collected 350 bags of plastic waste and expected to collect 1,000 more bags. Two days earlier, Sophal had announced that there was 10 tons of plastic waste ready to be sold. Most of that waste had been collected by the Me Chrey villagers months ago in the flooded forest, in the water and along the Tonle Sap riverbank, this waste having accumulated over a long period of time and having been stored in the waste barn, Sophal said.

For this campaign, 10 tons of milled rice is needed to distribute to the 1,000 or so households living on the Tonle Sap Lake and taking part in the campaign, he said. These also are people who lack food as a whole, he added.

The foundation needs donations to get the rice to distribute to the families taking part in the plastic-waste cleanup campaign, Sophal said.

At this point of the campaign, the Bamboo Shoot Foundation team also needs 2,500 bags or so to collect the plastic waste set aside by the villagers, he said. The foundation also needs 3.5 tons of rice to distribute to the 350 households of Me Chrey village as encouragement for their hard work: They collected plastic waste before the rainy season that may cause water levels to rise on the Tonle Sap lake around June 2023, he said.

Originally written in Khmer for ThmeyThmey, this story was translated by Meng Seavmey for Cambodianess.