The Siem Reap River Festival was help in November 2019, and had a great long term result, which was via the use of our Global Alert app to decide where the hotspots of plastic accumulation were along the river. We then worked with four local villages and their chiefs, along the river, to decide where to put up a series of catchment nets, with the help of the local fishermen. The results were great, and still continue, now bringing pride to the community there for their waters that they are happy to protect. This is a perfect example of the "Broken Windows" theory, and how cleaning the trash out of the waterways can bring trust, engagement and pride to the community to then continue to keep it clean, once it has been cleaned via these nets and people removing material. The nets acts as awareness and education tools to also highlight that trash keeps coming/flowing if not focused on accordingly.
We created our Feet and Hands, Boats and Dams video based on their collective work, which showed that collaboration can also bring people together, when before, they never worked together (village to village) in a unified way). You can read our Case Study here.
We are now planning our Water Falling Festival for November 2020, in a socially distanced manner, and with support from the government to extend our Plastic Catch program to 30 villages along the Tonle Sap Lake! Great stuff!
