Afroz Shah
Afroz Shah Foundation – Mumbai, India
Afroz Shah is an Indian environmental activist and lawyer from Mumbai. He is best known for organizing the world’s largest beach clean-up project, which has grown into a movement that has inspired people around the world to clean up their surrounding environment.
In October 2015, Shah and his neighbor Harbansh Mathur, an 84-year-old who has since passed away, were frustrated with the piles of decomposing waste that had washed up and completely overwhelmed the city’s Versova beach. Determined to do something about it, the pair started cleaning up the beach themselves, one piece of rubbish at a time.
Every weekend since, Shah has inspired volunteers to join him – from slum-dwellers to Bollywood stars, from schoolchildren to politicians. They have been turning up at Versova for what Shah calls “a date with the ocean”, but what in reality means labouring shin-deep in rotting garbage under the scorching Indian sun.
So far, the volunteers have collected over 4,000 tons of trash from the 2.5 kilometre beach.
Shah, who rallied residents and fisherfolk by knocking on doors and explaining the damage marine litter causes, now plans to expand his group’s operation to prevent litter from washing down the local creek and onto the beach. He also wants to clean-up the coastline’s rubbish-choked mangrove forests, which act as a natural defense against storm surges, and to inspire similar groups across India and beyond to launch their own clean-up movements.
In 2016, Shah was named by the United Nations as a Champion of the Earth. Inspired by Afroz Shah’s effort to clean beaches in Mumbai, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) launched the Clean Seas campaign globally.
He vows to continue his beach clean-up crusade until people and their governments around the world change their approach to producing, using and discarding plastic and other products that wash up onto beaches all over the world. He created the Afroz Shah Foundation to bring about individual behavioural changes – to move from linear economy to circular economy.
“I am an ocean lover and feel that we owe a duty to our ocean to make it free of plastic. I just hope this is the beginning for coastal communities across India and the world.”
Website: Afroz Shah Foundation
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afroz.shah.984
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afrozshah_/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/afroz-shah-9331881a/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/AfrozShah1
Video 1) Champion of the Earth 2016
Video 2) Fighting Plastic and Public Ridicule
