The monk and a Hippo cleaning up plastic pollution

Desperate to restore the Chao Praya River, an abbot at a Bangkok temple began recycling-now he has an ally

- Claire Turrell

'Once upon a time this river was filled with fish; now, nothing swims in it any more," said Wat Chak Daeng temple's abbot, Phra Mahapranom Dhammalangkaro, as he looked out over Bangkok's Chao Praya River.

As a novice monk in the 1980s, he remembers seeing children playing in the river and people scooping up handfuls of water to drink. But when he became abbot of Wat Chak Daeng more than 25 years later, those bucolic images were a thing of the past. Instead, when he arrived at the 240-year-old temple, he was saddened by the sight of the dirty river and the rubbish-strewn grounds around it.

Dhammalangkaro knew that if nothing was done, the situation would only get worse. He built a recycling centre in the temple grounds, which evolved from collecting a handful of bottles to upcycling 300 tonnes of plastic a year. His biggest problem was the river itself.

But then he met Tom PeacockNazil, chief executive of Seven Clean Seas, an organisation that finds solutions for plastic pollution. Last month the two men launched the Hippo, a solar-powered boat, which aims to remove 1,400 tonnes of plastic a year from Bangkok's busiest waterway.

"I want to take the waste from the river before it goes to the sea," said Dhammalangkaro.

The Chao Phraya River stretches more than 370km from the northern Nakhon Sawan province to the Gulf of Thailand and is home to critically endangered species such as the Siamese tigerfish, giant barb and Chao Phraya giant catfish.