60 Bangkok teams collect garbage to vie for best litter picker award in Japan

The first-ever Thailand stage of the Spogomi World Cup was held at Parc Paragon in cooperation with Siam Piwat under its “Siam Piwat 360 – Waste Journey to Zero Waste” programme.

Siam Piwat is a Bangkok-based real-estate and retail development company and is best known for managing Siam Centre, Siam Discovery, Siam Paragon and IconSiam shopping malls in the capital.

In his opening speech, Chadchart said Bangkok has to handle about 10,000 tonnes of garbage daily and to tackle this, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) kicked off its Zero Waste programme last year. The goal was to encourage Bangkokians to get into the habit of separating waste. He said this has already helped cut down the garbage by 300 to 700 tonnes daily.

“This is a small project, but it’s a start with the potential to become a great one,” Chadchart said, adding that separating waste will allow more garbage to be recycled and put to good use.

“If everybody lends a hand, waste will go down to zero eventually,” the governor said. “Then the BMA will be able to use the 7 billion baht spent yearly on garbage disposal on better things like education, public health services and care for the elderly.”

The governor added that the BMA is also encouraging students at BMA-run schools to separate waste and help keep the city clean.

The 60 teams participating in the Spogomi World Cup 2023 Thailand Stage were dispatched to pick litter around the Siam Paragon compound. After spending an hour collecting litter, the teams were then given 20 minutes to separate the garbage. The litter was separated into four groups: plastic; glass and aluminium; paper and cigarette butts. The teams were graded based on the types and amounts of collected litter.