The origins of Thant Myanmar (Clean Myanmar in Burmese) can be traced back to World Environment Day in 2018, when a group of friends and colleagues in the development sector embarked on a social campaign to fight against plastic pollution. The year after, they turned the movement into a company.
Since then, many of the people who organised the movement with Mr Friedor Jeske have left Thant Myanmar, but co-founder and current Director and Programme Manager for Solid Waste and Campaigns has remained ever since.
Mr Jeske first became interested in the waste issue due to his involvement in a Yangon recycling study, drawn by the mixture of ingenuity, local logics, social stigmatisation, challenges, and poverty related to the waste.
Our team had the opportunity to talk with Mr Jeske about his journey leading to the launch of Thank Myanmar, his understanding of plastic waste in his country, and how he considers local-scale solutions to be key to successful waste management.
The Centre: What is Thant Myanmar?
Thant Myanmar is registered as a for-profit company because in Myanmar, non-profit companies are not allowed. But in reality, the company functions on a non-profit basis. Before the 2021 political crisis in Myanmar, our biggest funders were the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB). We did a lot of leakage surveys on the soil, beaches and rivers to add into WB support of the National Plastic Action Plan.
But now, our work is focusing more on community-oriented themes, such as informal waste collection, household source segregation, and organic waste treatment at the source. Our current financial resources come from the United Nations, the European Union, small embassy grants, and other partner organisations working in the related fields. I think the key to survival for organisations like us is to be able to cover the entire waste stream, from upstream, to midstream, to downstream, especially in the low-income scenario.
Upstream would be basically everything around fossil fuels extraction and plastic production. The midstream starts from brand usage until the waste is generated, while the downstream is about recycling, waste management, and leakage.
We have a flagship programme on rural waste management. In Myanmar, people living in rural areas do not have access to municipal waste management services. This is the reality of nearly every village, and the rural population needs to solve the waste management issue by themselves. In the absence of government intervention, people fall back on unsustainable means such as dumping waste in the nearby rivers or burning it.
In the past, we tried to create a designated site for the waste disposal to prevent people from burning their waste. However, due to lack of appropriate land, our target population did not accept this initiative. Since the waste disposal site project did not work, we then moved on to propose an improved incineration operation. Based on our experience, around 90% of the waste in rural areas is organic, while the remaining 5%-7% is plastic. Collecting all waste, including organics, puts a heavy burden on a community collection system which operates on no or very little budget.
From this experience, we recognised that source segregation was both the bottleneck and the potential key to success in setting up voluntary community-led movements in rural areas. With this in mind, I would say that the new system is working decently for now.
We are using an inventive system called a burn-cage, adopted from the American military. We build the metal cages in layers and that works amazingly well. But the system’s good functioning relies on the weather conditions. When it is rainy, humidity becomes a problem. While when it is dry, the temperature of the incinerator can reach 850 degrees Celsius or even higher.
I am trying to find a cleaner alternative because this incineration method produces toxic fumes. However, I need to take into consideration not just technical but financial feasibility too. The burn-cage costs around US$200-300 per unit. Meanwhile, any form of better structured incinerator would cost above $2,000. For us, the $2,000 would constitute the entire budget that we mobilised to set up the system, including the burn-cage. On top of this, more than a better incinerator, the bigger challenge lies in the acceptance of the importance of waste collection among the target communities. Raising awareness and ensuring people’s buy-in are our priorities at the moment.
Plastic pollution in Myanmar is terrible. People both in urban and rural areas are accustomed to burning their waste or disposing of it in nearby waterways. The monsoon rain creates flooding and strong run-offs carrying waste into the rivers. When we hike in the mountains and look at creeks from high up, we see a mountain of plastics.
The responsibility for disposal mainly falls on municipalities. However, often their understanding of the issue, as well as strong budget constraints, result in the open burning of many dumps, partly on purpose. Additionally, dumps are often situated on slopes or close (to them), sometimes in water sources, creating strong leakages during the rainy season.
When it comes to recycling, even the remote rural area in Myanmar are relatively well covered thanks to a strong waste picker network. In cities, we observe a very high recycling rate. The informal waste pickers take out nearly everything which has some kind of value. In Myanmar, we currently have around 0.3 kg to 0.4 kg of waste generation per capita/day. This number is very low compared to neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia.
As a low-income country, I would say that Myanmar is very well-organised in terms of ensuing the circularity of products. We repair, resell, and keep things as long as possible. However, plastic is mainly single use and has no value, so it is not collected by waste pickers, and very often finds its way into nature.
Recycling in this country is very localised and rudimental. Here, you would find a recycling company in people’s backyards and often run without electricity. They cut and wash plastics like high density polyethylene (HDPE) by hand. They use feedstocks for whatever they need. A little bit more advanced recyclers use old washing machines. People can demonstrate a high degree of ingenuity when it comes to extracting value from recyclables. During the last 10 to 15 years more modern recycling plants were set up with as many as 100 tons of input per month.
Yes, the consumption rate is very low. If we look at just plastics, Burmese only use about 10% of what Japanese or European people use on average. For other consumable products, people in Myanmar are not so much responsible for the waste generation, they are rather contributing to the solution by reusing products purchased on the second-hand market. For example, people frequently purchase second-hand bicycles coming from Japan. In this respect, Myanmar can be considered to be playing a crucial role in the global circular system. Second-hand products are not necessarily negative, they are more affordable.
The second-hand market is quite extensive here, you can find nearly everything. Electronics, bicycles, cars, clothing, the list goes on. People make good use of the full value of any products, do not needlessly throw them away, and repair and reuse for a very long time. Here, we can easily find a repair shop, and the cost is low. It is the complete opposite of what happens in advanced economies. For instance, if my refrigerator is broken in the US, it would be cheaper to buy a new one than try to fix it.
Paradoxically, poverty is the driver of circularity. The poorer you are, the more circular you are obliged to think and behave with the scarce resources. People cannot afford to needlessly throw things away. If you go to a village difficult to reach from the consumerist world, you can find people living in a more or less closed loop economy. They have nothing coming from outside and conversely nothing is going out. They do not throw things away. We have a lot to learn from people like that, and from countries like Myanmar.
Our research projects were mainly conducted in secondary cities, because data was already available from the three bigger cities where there is a condensed population, such as Yangon and Mandalay. Once we move out of the metropolitan areas, waste related statistics and data on which we can base our study is practically unavailable. Researchers would encounter similar complications if they tried to conduct research in the islands and villages of Indonesia, for example. So the availability of reliable data was the main reason for choosing secondary cities for the study.
It is a complicated question. In Myanmar, economic and political difficulties dictate people’s livelihood and lifestyle, and I do not think that people here see the environmental issue as their priority. It is not that they are completely unaware or uncaring, they just see it as their second, third, fourth priority.
Also, it depends a little bit on whether you happen to live in an area where there are good waste management services. Then the awareness level is minimal because the system already works very well. The experience in European countries is a good example. On the contrary, in many parts of Myanmar awareness alone is not enough, people need to make active efforts. These include bringing their own waste, segregating it, walking around 500 metres from home to the community bin, or paying a lot of money for someone to transport it to the landfill. The more rural it gets, the more difficult it becomes for individuals to dispose of waste in the right way. They first have to create a collection system.
There is no particular waste management regulation in rural settings, as the waste does not exist as a problem. Household waste is considered to be predominantly composed of organic matter and therefore should be treated locally. As for regulations in urban areas, some of them are simply incompatible with the reality of the local context. For instance, in Yangon, waste is not allowed to be treated at source. This does not encourage waste segregation and composting, nor does this facilitate informal waste collection and recycling. Here, the regulations are running against possible local solutions and wisdom. I think this is a big issue – regulations are created by the people who do not understand the problem at hand.
In the past, some organisations came up with sophisticated propositions to encourage waste segregation. Once, there was the introduction of source segregation using waste bags coloured differently in Yangon. However, this was not facilitated through segregated collection. They introduced this in 2013 and it had zero impact on the problem. So, understanding how local systems work is important when formulating effective local regulations.
The enforcement is yet another big problem. The government tried to support waste management action plans at the national and city level. However, they do not have a firm understanding of the waste flow, or how funds are circulating to keep the waste collection mechanism afloat. It is complicated. Without unpacking the complexity first, it would be difficult to propose any effective solutions. Also, it is important to add that informal waste collectors are not even recognised by the government. Although they are the only ones who actually solve the problem, they are not offered any support.
We need more upstream solutions. Upstream here could be in the form of plastic taxation. We need to install a polluters pay system, meaning that plastic producers and brands become responsible not only in the form of EPR (extended producer responsibility), but also funding sustainable disposal of waste in general. Recovering SWM (solid waste management) funds from citizens is not an effective measure to build a sustainable system. Making the producer responsible for the entire product life cycle is more effective.
Installing an EPR system will be very complicated in Myanmar because a lot of products are not necessarily locally produced, but come from Thailand or China through border trades. Goods are coming in from different points of entry across the border and are not well regulated. There is no strict control, and the government does not have a clear understanding of the local production and import activities in the country.
We need a supra-national mechanism whereby the polluters, either the petroleum sector or plastic producers, are taxed. This mechanism would be effective for Myanmar because we neither have the capacity to regulate our borders nor tax the producers in the right way. Global taxes would increase the chance that the government would take decisive actions and go into banning SUPs (single-use plastics) locally. This has to go together with local production and consumption, as in our case this is the direction to promote sustainability.
Director and Programme Manager for Solid Waste and Campaigns, Thant Myanmar
The origins of Thant Myanmar (Clean Myanmar in Burmese) can be traced back to World Environment Day in 2018, when a group of friends and colleagues in the development sector embarked on a social campaign to fight against plastic pollution. The year after, they turned the movement into a company.
Since then, many of the people who organised the movement with Mr Friedor Jeske have left Thant Myanmar, but co-founder and current Director and Programme Manager for Solid Waste and Campaigns has remained ever since.
Mr Jeske first became interested in the waste issue due to his involvement in a Yangon recycling study, drawn by the mixture of ingenuity, local logics, social stigmatisation, challenges, and poverty related to the waste.
Our team had the opportunity to talk with Mr Jeske about his journey leading to the launch of Thank Myanmar, his understanding of plastic waste in his country, and how he considers local-scale solutions to be key to successful waste management.
The Centre: What is Thant Myanmar?
Thant Myanmar is registered as a for-profit company because in Myanmar, non-profit companies are not allowed. But in reality, the company functions on a non-profit basis. Before the 2021 political crisis in Myanmar, our biggest funders were the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB). We did a lot of leakage surveys on the soil, beaches and rivers to add into WB support of the National Plastic Action Plan.
But now, our work is focusing more on community-oriented themes, such as informal waste collection, household source segregation, and organic waste treatment at the source. Our current financial resources come from the United Nations, the European Union, small embassy grants, and other partner organisations working in the related fields. I think the key to survival for organisations like us is to be able to cover the entire waste stream, from upstream, to midstream, to downstream, especially in the low-income scenario.
Upstream would be basically everything around fossil fuels extraction and plastic production. The midstream starts from brand usage until the waste is generated, while the downstream is about recycling, waste management, and leakage.
We have a flagship programme on rural waste management. In Myanmar, people living in rural areas do not have access to municipal waste management services. This is the reality of nearly every village, and the rural population needs to solve the waste management issue by themselves. In the absence of government intervention, people fall back on unsustainable means such as dumping waste in the nearby rivers or burning it.
In the past, we tried to create a designated site for the waste disposal to prevent people from burning their waste. However, due to lack of appropriate land, our target population did not accept this initiative. Since the waste disposal site project did not work, we then moved on to propose an improved incineration operation. Based on our experience, around 90% of the waste in rural areas is organic, while the remaining 5%-7% is plastic. Collecting all waste, including organics, puts a heavy burden on a community collection system which operates on no or very little budget.
From this experience, we recognised that source segregation was both the bottleneck and the potential key to success in setting up voluntary community-led movements in rural areas. With this in mind, I would say that the new system is working decently for now.
We are using an inventive system called a burn-cage, adopted from the American military. We build the metal cages in layers and that works amazingly well. But the system’s good functioning relies on the weather conditions. When it is rainy, humidity becomes a problem. While when it is dry, the temperature of the incinerator can reach 850 degrees Celsius or even higher.
I am trying to find a cleaner alternative because this incineration method produces toxic fumes. However, I need to take into consideration not just technical but financial feasibility too. The burn-cage costs around US$200-300 per unit. Meanwhile, any form of better structured incinerator would cost above $2,000. For us, the $2,000 would constitute the entire budget that we mobilised to set up the system, including the burn-cage. On top of this, more than a better incinerator, the bigger challenge lies in the acceptance of the importance of waste collection among the target communities. Raising awareness and ensuring people’s buy-in are our priorities at the moment.
Plastic pollution in Myanmar is terrible. People both in urban and rural areas are accustomed to burning their waste or disposing of it in nearby waterways. The monsoon rain creates flooding and strong run-offs carrying waste into the rivers. When we hike in the mountains and look at creeks from high up, we see a mountain of plastics.
The responsibility for disposal mainly falls on municipalities. However, often their understanding of the issue, as well as strong budget constraints, result in the open burning of many dumps, partly on purpose. Additionally, dumps are often situated on slopes or close (to them), sometimes in water sources, creating strong leakages during the rainy season.
When it comes to recycling, even the remote rural area in Myanmar are relatively well covered thanks to a strong waste picker network. In cities, we observe a very high recycling rate. The informal waste pickers take out nearly everything which has some kind of value. In Myanmar, we currently have around 0.3 kg to 0.4 kg of waste generation per capita/day. This number is very low compared to neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia.
As a low-income country, I would say that Myanmar is very well-organised in terms of ensuing the circularity of products. We repair, resell, and keep things as long as possible. However, plastic is mainly single use and has no value, so it is not collected by waste pickers, and very often finds its way into nature.
Recycling in this country is very localised and rudimental. Here, you would find a recycling company in people’s backyards and often run without electricity. They cut and wash plastics like high density polyethylene (HDPE) by hand. They use feedstocks for whatever they need. A little bit more advanced recyclers use old washing machines. People can demonstrate a high degree of ingenuity when it comes to extracting value from recyclables. During the last 10 to 15 years more modern recycling plants were set up with as many as 100 tons of input per month.
Yes, the consumption rate is very low. If we look at just plastics, Burmese only use about 10% of what Japanese or European people use on average. For other consumable products, people in Myanmar are not so much responsible for the waste generation, they are rather contributing to the solution by reusing products purchased on the second-hand market. For example, people frequently purchase second-hand bicycles coming from Japan. In this respect, Myanmar can be considered to be playing a crucial role in the global circular system. Second-hand products are not necessarily negative, they are more affordable.
The second-hand market is quite extensive here, you can find nearly everything. Electronics, bicycles, cars, clothing, the list goes on. People make good use of the full value of any products, do not needlessly throw them away, and repair and reuse for a very long time. Here, we can easily find a repair shop, and the cost is low. It is the complete opposite of what happens in advanced economies. For instance, if my refrigerator is broken in the US, it would be cheaper to buy a new one than try to fix it.
Paradoxically, poverty is the driver of circularity. The poorer you are, the more circular you are obliged to think and behave with the scarce resources. People cannot afford to needlessly throw things away. If you go to a village difficult to reach from the consumerist world, you can find people living in a more or less closed loop economy. They have nothing coming from outside and conversely nothing is going out. They do not throw things away. We have a lot to learn from people like that, and from countries like Myanmar.
Our research projects were mainly conducted in secondary cities, because data was already available from the three bigger cities where there is a condensed population, such as Yangon and Mandalay. Once we move out of the metropolitan areas, waste related statistics and data on which we can base our study is practically unavailable. Researchers would encounter similar complications if they tried to conduct research in the islands and villages of Indonesia, for example. So the availability of reliable data was the main reason for choosing secondary cities for the study.
It is a complicated question. In Myanmar, economic and political difficulties dictate people’s livelihood and lifestyle, and I do not think that people here see the environmental issue as their priority. It is not that they are completely unaware or uncaring, they just see it as their second, third, fourth priority.
Also, it depends a little bit on whether you happen to live in an area where there are good waste management services. Then the awareness level is minimal because the system already works very well. The experience in European countries is a good example. On the contrary, in many parts of Myanmar awareness alone is not enough, people need to make active efforts. These include bringing their own waste, segregating it, walking around 500 metres from home to the community bin, or paying a lot of money for someone to transport it to the landfill. The more rural it gets, the more difficult it becomes for individuals to dispose of waste in the right way. They first have to create a collection system.
There is no particular waste management regulation in rural settings, as the waste does not exist as a problem. Household waste is considered to be predominantly composed of organic matter and therefore should be treated locally. As for regulations in urban areas, some of them are simply incompatible with the reality of the local context. For instance, in Yangon, waste is not allowed to be treated at source. This does not encourage waste segregation and composting, nor does this facilitate informal waste collection and recycling. Here, the regulations are running against possible local solutions and wisdom. I think this is a big issue – regulations are created by the people who do not understand the problem at hand.
In the past, some organisations came up with sophisticated propositions to encourage waste segregation. Once, there was the introduction of source segregation using waste bags coloured differently in Yangon. However, this was not facilitated through segregated collection. They introduced this in 2013 and it had zero impact on the problem. So, understanding how local systems work is important when formulating effective local regulations.
The enforcement is yet another big problem. The government tried to support waste management action plans at the national and city level. However, they do not have a firm understanding of the waste flow, or how funds are circulating to keep the waste collection mechanism afloat. It is complicated. Without unpacking the complexity first, it would be difficult to propose any effective solutions. Also, it is important to add that informal waste collectors are not even recognised by the government. Although they are the only ones who actually solve the problem, they are not offered any support.
We need more upstream solutions. Upstream here could be in the form of plastic taxation. We need to install a polluters pay system, meaning that plastic producers and brands become responsible not only in the form of EPR (extended producer responsibility), but also funding sustainable disposal of waste in general. Recovering SWM (solid waste management) funds from citizens is not an effective measure to build a sustainable system. Making the producer responsible for the entire product life cycle is more effective.
Installing an EPR system will be very complicated in Myanmar because a lot of products are not necessarily locally produced, but come from Thailand or China through border trades. Goods are coming in from different points of entry across the border and are not well regulated. There is no strict control, and the government does not have a clear understanding of the local production and import activities in the country.
We need a supra-national mechanism whereby the polluters, either the petroleum sector or plastic producers, are taxed. This mechanism would be effective for Myanmar because we neither have the capacity to regulate our borders nor tax the producers in the right way. Global taxes would increase the chance that the government would take decisive actions and go into banning SUPs (single-use plastics) locally. This has to go together with local production and consumption, as in our case this is the direction to promote sustainability.
Director and Programme Manager for Solid Waste and Campaigns, Thant Myanmar
