What Clean Really Means

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In many places across the Philippines, plastic isn’t just trash. It’s survival.

It lines the shelves of sari-sari stores, tucked into fifteen-peso sachets of shampoo and thirty-peso packs of instant noodles. To some, it’s pollution. To others, it’s the only thing a day’s wage can afford. 

For millions, especially those earning just enough to make it to tomorrow, sachet goods are the most accessible form of choice. Not the most sustainable, but the most possible.

We’ve gotten used to telling the story this way: that plastic pollution is caused by personal choices. That if only people were more disciplined—more “aware”—our oceans would be clean. But that narrative leaves out so much. 

It’s easier to frame the plastic crisis as a matter of individual discipline: bring a tote bag, skip the straw, recycle better. But when the tide rises and floodwaters choke coastal towns, it’s not the corporations or policymakers who get blamed—it’s the very people who have the least choice.

Because this isn’t just a waste problem. It’s a power problem. It’s about who gets to choose, and who gets stuck with the consequences. It’s about who gets heard when the sea is choking, and who gets ignored even as their homes are swallowed by it.

Who gets to decide what “sustainability” looks like? Who gets shamed for using plastic, while multinational companies continue to flood the market with single-use packaging designed to be cheap, profitable, and disposable—just like the lives they often exploit? 

For too long, the environmental narrative has focused on the symptoms—plastic in the ocean, wrappers in the street, waste in the wind—without tracing the illness back to its roots. Poverty. Policy. Profit. A system that leaves some people with no other option but to consume in the very way they are punished for.

This World Environment Day, let us not flatten the story to beach cleanups and social media pledges. Let’s name the real forces at play: profit-driven production, environmental injustice, and unequal access to safe alternatives. Let’s give space to the communities who have long been painted as villains—when in truth, they are the first to suffer, and the last to be heard.

Because we can’t beat plastic pollution if we keep ignoring the people most entangled in it.
We can’t heal ecosystems without also healing the economies that keep certain lives disposable. And we can’t tell the truth about the climate crisis while skipping over the stories of those most silenced by it.

They live where the floods come first. They fish in waters no longer clean. They’re told they are the problem, when in fact, they’ve been carrying the weight of it all along.

It’s time to stop asking only where the trash goes.
It’s time to ask where the truth has been.

Let this be the year we choose justice, not just for the planet, but for the people living closest to its wounds. 

Because if we want a cleaner planet, we have to start with something messier: the systems, the silences, the truth.

And that starts with listening—especially to those surviving at the edge of every cleanup campaign, of every corporate pledge, and of every promise for change.

Learn more about the 2030 Youth Force in the Philippines Inc. by following their Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.