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The world's longest unbroken sea beach is located in the southernmost part of Bangladesh, and the plastic bags, straws, and cups that are tossed aside at cafes and parks end up everywhere, from the bellies of turtles to the shores of isolated islands.
It's no wonder, then, that nearly a million Rohingya refugees living in refugee camps in the area have decided to do something about it.
The International Organization for Migration and its partner, Dushtha Shasthya Kendra, started a waste collection volunteer group in Cox's Bazar in April, and since then, they've collected more than 24,000 pounds of plastic bags, as well as non-biodegradable waste such as plastic, polyethylene, and other packaging, and fed them into a machine that melts the small pieces of plastic into noodles, reports the IOM.
The plastic is then used to make learning materials and other products, such as letter blocks for children and slabs of pavement for children's latrines.
The recycling plant is part of the IOM's Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) program, and it's part of a larger effort to reduce, reuse, and recycling of waste produced by refugees in the camp, which is the largest in the world, per the IOM.
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Social Entrepreneurship
Spotlight
Building a Million Dollar Company Where Everyone Counts
Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.