Weighed, not counted

In 1999, at a municipal school in Phitsanulok, somebody had an idea that was either very small or very large depending on how long you look at it.

Instead of the children throwing their rubbish away, they would bring it in. It would be weighed. And the value would be credited to an account in their name.

A bank where the deposit is rubbish.

The school was Thetsaban 5, Wat Phan Pi, in Mueang district. Twenty-seven years later there are more than 7,700 of these across Thailand, they handle around 1.4 million tonnes of recyclable material a year — roughly 6% of the country’s total solid waste — and some of them will pay for your funeral.

How it actually works

The mechanics are deliberately, almost pedantically, those of a bank.

You bring sorted material — plastics, paper, glass, metal. It is weighed. The weight is multiplied by a posted rate. The amount is written into a passbook against your name.

You can leave it there. You can withdraw it in cash. And in a good number of schemes you can leave it in a สวัสดิการ — a welfare fund — which is where this stops being a recycling programme and becomes something else.

Some waste banks pay a funeral benefit.

Article 29 Life insurance with no insurer described ฌาปนกิจสงเคราะห์, the mutual funeral aid societies where members pay ฿20 to ฿100 each time another member dies. This is the same instrument with a different input. You are not paying premiums in money. You are paying them in rubbish, and the fund that buries you was assembled from other people’s bottles.

I’ve been writing about the Thai parallel economy for a year and that is the most quietly remarkable thing I have found in it.

The banks are run by an elected committee — คณะกรรมการบริหารธนาคารขยะ — with a chair, a treasurer, records, and a rate that gets set and posted.

What this solves, and I missed it

Here is the part I want to be honest about, because it’s a correction to my own work.

Article 91 Paid by weight described Thailand’s actual recycling system: an estimated 1.5 million informal collectors — ซาเล้ง — buying material from households, paid by weight, employed by nobody. I found that they recover most of the plastic Thailand recycles, that they have no protective equipment, and that their income depends on a scrap price nobody publishes.

I ended that article recommending, as the single cheapest useful intervention: publish the scrap price.

It already exists. Not nationally, but in 7,700 communities, on a board, next to a set of scales, updated by a committee.

The waste bank is the saleng transaction with the information asymmetry removed. Same material, same weighing, same buyer further up the chain. The difference is that the rate is posted before you hand anything over, and the transaction is written down.

Article 80 Money you can wear argued that Thailand’s informal systems work when there is a product standard and a published price — gold has both, and it protects the poorest participant. The waste bank has both. It is gold’s mechanism applied to a rice sack of bottles, and it was invented by a primary school.

I should have found this when I wrote article 91 Paid by weight and I didn’t.

The question I can’t answer, and it matters

Now the uncomfortable part, because a piece that is only charmed by this is not doing its job.

A household depositing at the waste bank is a household not selling to the saleng.

Both are aggregators. Both buy sorted recyclables from the same households and sell on to the same junk shops and recycling plants. They are competing for the same material at the same point in the chain.

So: does the waste bank take income from the informal collector?

I genuinely don’t know, and I can construct the argument either way.

Against: 1.4 million tonnes a year is material that the saleng would otherwise have bought, at a lower price, from people who didn’t know the rate. That is 1.5 million people’s earnings, reduced by a well-intentioned programme.

For: waste banks aggregate material that was previously thrown away rather than sold — the participation is the point, and the volume may be additional rather than diverted. And a rising local price floor helps anyone selling into the same market, including the saleng.

Nobody appears to have measured which it is. Given that one side of this comparison is 1.5 million of the poorest workers in the country and the other is a UN-supported national programme, it is a question somebody should ask before the programme scales further, and it is exactly the sort of thing that goes unasked because both parties are sympathetic.

Why it spread

Three reasons, and the third is the interesting one.

It costs almost nothing to start. A set of scales, a notebook, a committee and somewhere dry to keep the material.

It has an institutional home. The Ministry of Interior issued national guidelines in 2024, and in April that year the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the UN jointly marked the partnership. Banks have attached themselves — the Government Savings Bank runs a prototype project, Krungthai has backed a UNDP-BIOFIN scheme in Phetchaburi, and a Royal Danish Embassy handbook exists for communities setting one up.

And it teaches by being real. The thing that started in a school works as education precisely because the money is not pretend. A child who has watched a kilo of PET turn into a number in a passbook has learned something about weight, price and saving that no lesson delivers, and the reason it stuck is that the balance was theirs.

What it doesn’t take

One practical limit worth knowing, and it connects to article 99 The bottle stays.

Thin-film plastic — the bag your drink comes in — has essentially no scrap value. A waste bank that pays by weight against a market rate cannot pay meaningfully for something the market does not want, and the single most-used disposable object in Thailand therefore falls outside the system as completely as it falls outside the saleng’s.

The waste bank fixes the price problem. It does not fix the worthlessness problem, and no committee can, because the rate is set by what the recycler will pay.

Common misconceptions

“It’s a school recycling project.” It began in one, in 1999. There are now over 7,700 across the country handling around 6% of national solid waste.

“It’s symbolic.” 1.4 million tonnes a year, with reported avoidance of over 550,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

“It’s the same as selling to the saleng.” Same material, same weighing. The difference is the rate is posted in advance and the transaction is recorded.

“The money is trivial.” In schemes with a welfare fund, accumulated balances underwrite benefits including funeral payments.

“It handles all household waste.” It handles what has scrap value. Thin-film plastic bags do not, and remain outside it.