This year we started a trash bank for the school children attending our Klongtoey Nai and Romklao Mercy Preschools. It’s a beautiful concept that we hope to expand to all our Mercy kindergartens in the near future.

The program logistics are really quite simple: Every Friday morning, our students bring recyclable trash to school that they and their parents have collected in the previous week. The trash is weighed and valued accordingly, converted into savings, and deposited in each student’s savings pass book.

The individual savings are later used to pay for school costs or family emergencies.

This program is already making a big difference for many of our school children whose parents scrape to get by day to day. At the same time, it teaches all our students important lessons about their environment and keeping their neighborhood clean. These early lessons can pay huge dividends in our planet’s future.