Meeting Sustainable Maikhao Foundation: The first stretch of the walk

As A Walk Around Phuket makes its way up the island's coastline, the beaches we cross aren't just scenery. For one local organization, they're a daily challenge. Last Friday I had the opportunity to talk with Michelle from Sustainable Maikhao Foundation, on the very stretch of coast the walk passed through during the first stage to understand what it really takes to keep a beach clean. The answer is a lot more than a bin bag and good intentions.

Not just picking up litter — measuring it

Sustainable Maikhao Foundation doesn't simply collect rubbish. Every clean-up, the team sorts what they find into 16 separate categories and records the data, first on paper, now backed up digitally too. "It's important for people to see that we are really collecting the data," Michelle told me. "It's not just numbers we invent."

That transparency is deliberate. Photos and social posts accompany every clean-up, because people who donate "want to know what you're doing with their money." The data isn't just paperwork; it is a way of being accountable.

It also reveals something important: of everything they collect, only three types of waste genuinely can't be recycled and must go to landfill: general mixed rubbish, fishing nets and ropes, and polystyrene. Everything else, the team works to divert, even finding creative partners for the hard-to-recycle items most yards won't touch: shoes, bottle caps, lighters, straws. She had warm words, too, for the overwhelmed workers at the island's incinerator: "We call them our heroes." The goal of all that sorting is simple: keep as much as possible out of an already-overloaded landfill that sits, worryingly, right beside the ocean.

Examples of the types of rubbish collected and sorted in beach cleanups

The number that stopped me: ten tons in five months

Since 2019, Michelle has dreamed of a team that cleaned every day, not just the one-off clean-ups with schools and visiting companies. The obstacle was always money: relying on occasional donations made it impossible to guarantee salaries.

The breakthrough came from the hotels. She proposed the idea to their general managers, and they backed it: a five-month pilot funded by 11 hotels each contributing monthly, enough to employ a small daily team. The result? Working six days a week, that team (with hotel and school groups pitching in) collected ten tons of rubbish in five months. Around four tons were recycled; six were those stubborn landfill categories. Sobering, but far better than sending all ten.

Where does it all come from?

Roughly 80% washes in from the sea, Michelle estimates, the rest left by picnickers and fishermen. The monsoon months, August to October, are the worst, bringing rubbish from across the region. She has pulled labels from the Middle East, Singapore and Malaysia, one persistent noodle cup from Jakarta, and, over the years, at least three or four refrigerator doors. There's a painful irony, too: because people know the team is paid, some feel freer to leave their rubbish behind. It's the hardest part of the job to accept.

Nothing wasted: bottle caps, straws and lighters given a second life

The bigger fight

Clean-ups treat the symptom. Michelle's real ambition is a plastic-reduction campaign built on her team's data, but change here is slow and hard-won. Enforcement is difficult, progress depends on many different players, and continuity is hard to maintain, so momentum is easily lost.

So the strategy is patient alliance-building. Today, 12 hotels and three government agencies have signed an MOU under an ongoing project called Mai Khao as One, imagining what the area should look like a decade from now: development that lets local people keep their land and livelihoods.

Talking with Michelle, one thing became clear. The coastline this walk crosses is cared for by people doing quietly heroic, often thankless work, and staying hopeful through every up and down. That patient, step-by-step spirit is exactly what this walk is about.

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Sustainable Maikhao Foundation is a Thai-registered nonprofit foundation working to protect the coast and sea of Mai Khao and Phuket through daily beach clean-ups, waste data collection, recycling, and community education. Their team sorts and records everything they collect and works with partners across the island through the Mai Khao as One alliance to reduce plastic at the source.

To learn more, support their work, or get involved, visit sustainablemaikhaofoundation.org or find them on Facebook and Instagram.