About

Do It By Heart has been cleaning the beaches around Koh Lipe every Monday since 2012. Anyone can join — most of the helpers are travellers who give a morning of their holiday to it.

Koh Lipe lies in Tarutao National Park. The small islands around it are uninhabited and protected — and that is exactly where the rubbish piles up: thousands of plastic bottles, carried ashore by the currents from the Maldives, Malaysia and Indonesia. Nobody lives there, so nobody clears it. We go out by boat and clean for two to three hours.

It is work that is never finished; the next tide brings more. But anyone who has seen what the sea carries ashore looks at plastic differently afterwards — at home too.

The initiative was founded by Darius Vakili from Switzerland and is also known as Trash Hero. In 2017 Swiss television SRF portrayed it in the documentary “Helden des Abfalls”. By then, SRF reported, the idea had spread to 30 groups in several countries, and 21,000 people had taken part in clean-ups.