Mitrade Foundation Joins RE-THINK to Clean One of Taiwan’s Most Overlooked Coasts

On 15 July 2026, Mitrade Foundation joined the Taiwan RE-THINK Environmental Education Association for a beach cleanup at Yunlin’s Lin Hai Park—one of Taiwan’s overlooked southwestern coasts. Here is why we backed the work and what a single day cleared.

Very often, when we think of a coastline, we picture the clean, open beaches you usually see on postcards and in tourism campaigns. The reality, in many places, is a tideline of bottles, caps, packaging and weathered fishing gear. How much of it collects there depends largely on where you are standing.

With Taiwan as an island nation, this means marine debris can easily wash up along its coastline. Citing Taiwan’s 2023 coastal cleanliness survey, RE-THINK reports that half of the island’s coastal rubbish settled along barely a tenth of its shoreline. The stretch covering Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi and Tainan accounted for more than a quarter of it.

Many of these coastal areas are difficult to reach, with limited access, no level ground to work from and little of the infrastructure a large cleanup relies on.

Mitrade Foundation aims to support issues that do not always receive enough attention or resources. A neglected coastline is one of them—a visible, manageable problem that comes down to who turns up, and whether they can get there. The progress, at least, is tangible: waste you can see, weigh and carry away by the bagful. Yunlin’s Lin Hai Park (雲林臨海園) is located within this often overlooked stretch of coastline. It is one of the places that receives fewer cleanup activities throughout the year.

Why We Worked With RE-THINK

The Taiwan RE-THINK Environmental Education Association has done exactly that since 2013. It has run at least 290 beach cleanups and removed more than 200 tonnes of waste from Taiwan’s coastlines. But the figure that stays with us is a quieter one: the tens of thousands of students reached through its programmes.

What drew us to RE-THINK was what it does alongside the cleaning. It treats every event as an opportunity to learn. Through projects such as The Guidebook of Marine Debris and Recycling Guide (回收大百科), RE-THINK traces waste back to its sources and makes a complicated subject easier to understand.

Its work has been recognised in Taiwan and internationally, including through Taiwan’s 2023 National Sustainable Development Award and Red Dot design honours. Cleaning and teaching, held together.

For a Foundation that cares about both the environment and access to knowledge, that pairing was the reason.

What We Did at Lin Hai Park

On 15 July 2026, we supported one of RE-THINK’s cleanups at Lin Hai Park. Together with more than 30 volunteers, the group collected 591.6kg of marine debris. Of which, 91.2kg were recyclables and remaining 500.4kg were general waste.

Mitrade Foundation contributed NTD 150,000 to support this initiative. The funding helped RE-THINK to organise a full cleanup on a coast well beyond the usual routes.

That was the shape of the partnership: RE-THINK brought its expertise and people on the ground, while our support helped the organisation reach a shoreline that rarely sees a cleanup.

Not everything we found was ordinary. Among the debris was a deity statue, possibly depicting Tudigong (土地公), a deity traditionally associated with protecting local land and communities. Finding it amid the waste was a quiet reminder that what washes up on a shoreline is seldom just rubbish. Sometimes, it carries a story about where it came from.

Why It Matters

One cleanup cannot solve the wider problem of marine waste. But it can remove hundreds of kilograms of debris from a coastline, send recyclable materials somewhere better than the sea and return an overlooked coast to the map, even if only for a while.

RE-THINK knows this shoreline and this work far better than we do. Our part was simply to help the organisation get there.

That is the work we mean to keep doing: standing behind people who are already doing it well and helping their efforts reach the places most easily overlooked.