After many successful projects in the past year, GRIP IT, a charitable organisation based in the south of Phuket that consists of friends from around the world who want to do good for the community, came up with a new exciting project. And this time, it’s about the most important element of life: clean drinking water.
GRIP IT team members and students of Wat Sawang Arom School in Rawai celebrate their first water-filtration system. Photo: Tonia Olsen / GRIP IT
GRIP IT has learned that Thai people in many areas have limited access to clean drinking water especially in underprivileged schools and villages.
“We want to make it easier and affordable for those people to have access to clean drinking water and to help reduce the burden of expense on drinking water from the locals,” said Nurama ‘Khun Ji’ Taleh, the head of GRIP IT team.
“We also hope that this project will help reduce the use of single-use plastics which has become a pressing issue worldwide,” she added.
GRIP IT has been in contact with Sombhop Khomkla, the principal of Wat Sawang Arom School in Rawai for a while. The team visited the school to donate toys to the students and had a chance to sit down with the principal to discuss what the students needed the most.
Mr Sombhop expressed that their drinking water issue required attention.
“Bottled drinking water is costly and wasteful but it is what the students have to rely on. The plastic bottles cannot always be reused or recycled. A water-filtration system could help reduce the parents’ expense on drinking water and the amount of single-used plastic bottles,” said Mr Sombhop.
The school collects the bottles in their recycle bins and can be sold to recycle facilities. However, the plastics cannot be recycled indefinitely as they lose their property each time they are processed. The school needed a more sustainable way to reduce plastic waste.
GRIP IT saw this as an opportunity to start this new project. This month, the team decided to help the school with this issue and installed GRIP IT’s first water-filtration system. They have received good feedback from the school staff and the students, who are very excited about the project.
“This is a good project that helps fulfil people’s basic needs and a good way to send a message to all the students and the communities about how a small action in our daily life can help the environment,” added Mr Sombhop.
The good news is this will not be the last. The team has planned to provide more water-filtration systems in Phuket and hopefully, nationwide in the future.
GRIP IT has been aiming to provide more sustainable support that leaves a long-lasting impact on local communities since the very beginning of the initiative. It is clear that this project set sail into that direction.
“We want to raise awareness about the lack of access to affordable clean drinking water and the amount of single-use plastics that comes from small drinking water bottles,” said Khun Ji.
“We want to invite people to use less single-use plastics by choosing sustainable alternatives whenever they can. Moreover, we hope this project will inspire more people to help their local community with this issue,” she added.
This is just one of many on-going projects that GRIP IT is doing. Their clothing and toy donation campaigns have been ongoing since last year. The donated clothes, toys and other products, such as sanitary products, from kind people all over Phuket have been distributed to hundreds of families throughout the year. The door is still wide open for anyone who wants to give back to the community.
To be a part of the project or if you need advice on how to help your community contact GRIP IT at ji@gripit.life, +66 993 600840 (Khun Ji) or Instagram @gripit_forward
