During the pandemic, a Buddhist monk in Myanmar named Abbot Ottamasara noticed an overwhelming amount of plastic waste generated by residents in his Yangon neighborhood. He decided to do something about it by turning the waste into a substitute for food bowls used by his monastery to feed thousands of people in need.
Ottamasara, who runs the Thabarwa meditation center, was shocked by the dozens of volunteers who responded to his request for plastic containers. Now, his team receives several thousand used plastic bottles per day from the community, of which some are recycled as containers for food and others used as building material for the meditation center.
Ottamasara launched the recycling drive three months ago after seeing all the excess waste piling up on the streets during his daily morning walks to collect food donations from the residents. “More plastic waste was being dumped on the street during the pandemic,” he said.
Around 2,500 tons of trash is thrown out every day in Yangon. Since authorities don’t routinely organize recycling in Myanmar, most of that waste ends up dumped on roads, in waterways or burned.
Ottamasara explained:
If we (the meditation centre) ask for donations, people will keep them clean. Then we can use these plastic bottles as food containers and it not only saves money, but also tackles the plastic waste issue.
Around 200,000 plastic bottles, equivalent to two tons of plastic waste, have already been recycled. Ottamasara estimates they’ve saved roughly $10,000 in construction costs. The meditation center runs workshops to process the plastic waste. Volunteers made sunshades by hanging stuffed plastic bottles on a net and they’ve constructed a shelter using car tires stuffed with plastic waste and cement to form the walls.
There are also Buddhist Monks in Thailand at Wat Chak Daeng temple who have been collecting bottles from a nearby river and turning the plastic waste into orange robes to cloth their monks. After Covid-19, those same monks started making blessed Covid-19 masks, with sacred prayers and scriptures scribbled on them, “to end all suffering caused by the coronavirus around the world.”
