26 November 2025
By Pranav Krishna
You don’t need a big organisation or fancy equipment — you just need to care. From a solo volunteer to leading a movement, Yasser Amin shares how Stridy is redesigning environmentalism to be accessible, fun, and completely community-led. Here is why you shouldn’t wait for permission to make a change.
It was 2020, the world was grappling with a pandemic, and Yasser Amin found himself at East Coast Beach, Singapore for his first organised cleanup. During a time when people craved safe outdoor activities and meaningful connection, the East Coast Beach Plan offered exactly that — a decentralised initiative that allowed anyone to organize cleanups without bureaucracy. What started as casual participation in the East Coast Beach Plan would soon evolve into something much bigger, such as weekly Wednesday morning cleanups that he’d lead for the next two years, rain or shine.
“The surprising thing was the turnout,” Yasser told me during our conversation. “Even during the pandemic, we’d have 10–15, sometimes even 20 people showing up at 9 AM. My friends thought I was crazy at first, but then they started joining too.”
Yasser’s story is particularly compelling because he represents a growing movement of young environmentalists who aren’t waiting for permission to create change. The decentralised nature of these cleanup initiatives meant anyone could step up and organise, and that’s exactly what he did.
Approximately 95 to 97 per cent of the trash on Singapore’s beaches isn’t even from Singapore, said Yasser, who’s spent countless hours observing seasonal patterns.
“During the Southwest Monsoon season from June to September, more trash from neighbouring countries like Indonesia gets carried to our shores. East Coast Park gets hit particularly hard during these months, while December to February sees much cleaner beaches,” explained Yasser.
This revelation tells me that the entire narrative around beach cleanups goes beyond local responsibility. It’s about regional cooperation and understanding how interconnected our environmental challenges truly are.
Yasser’s transition from volunteer to full-time environmental advocate wasn’t linear. Starting as a community organiser connected through social media, he watched Stridy grow from handling a handful of engagements in 2022 to managing 160 in 2024. The organisation now runs a mix of paid and unpaid activities, but what’s revolutionary is their approach to community empowerment.
At its core, Stridy is not merely a cleanup organization; it is a movement designed to shift the responsibility of cleanliness back into the hands of the community. Instead of focusing solely on beaches, where most trash is foreign, Stridy targets “heartland” litter — the local waste found around void decks, in car parks, barbecue pits, and pathways. Their objective is to make cleanups accessible, data-driven, and self-sustaining by teaching residents how to organise their own initiatives. Through the Stridy app, which allows users to log and categorise waste, they turn a simple act into a measurable impact, fostering a culture where environmental action becomes a regular, community-led habit rather than a one-off event.
“We don’t want people depending on us to organise cleanups forever,” Yasser emphasises. This philosophy drives everything Stridy does.
In one of Singapore’s heartland neighborhoods, Fernvale, Stridy implemented a six-month program that’s becoming their blueprint for community transformation. They provided residents with tools, signages, and most importantly, the knowledge to organise their own cleanups.
The results? The Fernvale community now self-organises regular cleanups, and there’s been a noticeable reduction in litter.
But here’s the secret sauce: they made it fun.
“People genuinely enjoy the social aspect,” Yasser notes. “There’s this sense of accomplishment when you see a dirty area transform in just 30 minutes. It’s instant gratification combined with community bonding.”
While beach cleanups get Instagram love, Stridy has strategically shifted focus to heartland areas like around neighbourhood car parks, void decks, hawker centres, coffeeshops and pathways where most of Singapore’s local trash actually accumulates.
This strategic pivot from beaches to heartlands was a deliberate one, born from a crucial insight. The Stridy team recognised that while beach cleanups are visible and rewarding, they primarily address a problem of foreign origin; with 95% to 97% of coastal trash washing ashore from elsewhere, these efforts don’t tackle Singapore’s own littering habits. The real, solvable issue was closer to home. By shifting focus to the local waste found in residential areas, Stridy could directly empower communities to take ownership of their immediate environment, moving from tackling a recurring external symptom to addressing the root cause of litter within Singapore.
“Beach cleanups are sexy, but heartland cleanups are necessary,” Yasser explains with a laugh. Their 2024 initiative in Fernvale proved this approach works, and they’re now eyeing expansion to high-traffic areas like the McDonald’s and hawker centers near East Coast Park.
This pivot represents a mature understanding of waste management: solve problems where they start, not where they end up.
What sets Stridy apart isn’t just their cleanup activities, it’s their philosophy of obsolescence. They’re actively working toward a future where they’re no longer needed, where communities self-organise, where environmental stewardship becomes as natural as taking out your own trash.
The Fernvale model proves it’s possible. Residents there now conduct their own cleanups, using tools and knowledge Stridy provided but no longer depending on external organization. It’s community empowerment at its finest.
To facilitate and track these community-led efforts, Stridy developed its own mobile application. This sophisticated platform functions as an impact-tracking tool that gamifies the cleanup process, allowing individuals and groups to log their sessions and categorize the types of waste collected. While the app has garnered 14,000 registered users, the team’s current focus is on increasing active engagement to harness the full potential of its data-collection capabilities.
Users can log sessions, categorise the types of waste collected, and track their collective impact. Groups like PassionWave use it for Marina Bay kayak cleanups, creating data-driven insights about urban trash patterns. Every piece of trash logged contributes to a larger understanding of waste patterns across regions.
Yasser proudly pulls out his phone to demonstrate the Stridy app. The interface is clean and modern, featuring a personal impact dashboard that visualizes a user’s contributions and a feature to log cleanup sessions with detailed waste categorization. The potential is clear: a powerful, data-driven tool for citizen-led environmental action.
However, herein lies the central paradox of Stridy’s mission in Singapore. Despite the app’s elegant design and noble purpose, Yasser is candid about its primary challenge: chronic underutilisation. The issue seems to be a curious side effect of Singapore’s own success. In a city renowned for its cleanliness, where an efficient public infrastructure makes waste largely invisible, the motivation for an individual to stop, pull out their phone, and meticulously log a discarded can or plastic bag is surprisingly low.
The physical act of cleaning provides an immediate sense of accomplishment, but the additional step of digital data entry introduces a layer of friction that many users bypass. It’s a behavioral hurdle; the app is a powerful solution, but it requires users to see a problem that, for many, has already been solved for them. As Yasser puts it, “Our biggest hurdle in Singapore is app underutilisation. We need more consistent users to make the data truly powerful.”
Within the next two years, they aim to hopefully replicate their model internationally, with strategic focus on capital cities in Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong that are heavily urbanised, rather than coastal areas. They are aiming for areas with sufficient infrastructures and communities who are ready to take ownership of their environmental impact.
“We’re not trying to solve every waste problem,” he clarifies. “We’re targeting areas where community-led litter-picking can make a real difference.”
After four years with the organisation, he still finds satisfaction in teaching others about sustainability during cleanup events, in seeing communities transform, in watching data points on the app translate to cleaner neighborhoods.
“We haven’t seen the massive shift in awareness we hoped for,” he admits. “But we have seen pockets of intense commitment, communities that get it, and individuals who become champions.”
When asked about his future with Stridy, Yasser doesn’t hesitate. “At least three more years as Chief Stridy Officer. There’s too much work left to do.”
When I ask about youth engagement, Yasser’s response is refreshingly candid. While some students show genuine interest, Singapore’s ultra-efficient waste management system creates an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality.
“Singapore’s infrastructure is so good at hiding waste that many young people don’t see it as an urgent issue,” he admits. “But those who do engage with us through school programs and competitions often become our most passionate advocates.”
This paradox of living in a clean city while surrounded by a region struggling with waste creates unique challenges for environmental education.
Here’s where Yasser gets passionate. The barrier to entry for environmental action is surprisingly low. You need a trash bag, a grabber (optional but helpful), 30 minutes of time, and a friend or two.
“The limiting factor isn’t resources or knowledge, it’s simply people willing to step up and lead,” he stresses. “If every HDB (government apartment) block had one person organising monthly cleanups, Singapore’s litter problem would virtually disappear.”
“You don’t need permission, you don’t need a big organisation, you don’t need fancy equipment,” he insists. “You just need to care enough to act.”
The Stridy app is there if you want to track impact, but it’s not mandatory. What’s mandatory is moving from awareness to action, from Instagram activism to actual activism.
As our conversation winds down, Yasser shares one final thought that encapsulates Stridy’s evolution: “We started thinking we were solving a trash problem. We realised we’re actually building communities.”
This shift from environmental service provider to community catalyst represents the maturation of not just Stridy, but the entire environmental movement. It’s not about heroic organisations saving the day; it’s about empowering ordinary people to become everyday environmentalists.
For Stridy, success isn’t measured just in kilogrammes of trash collected (though they track that too). It’s measured in communities that no longer need them, in youth who organise their own cleanups, in the gradual shift from “someone should do something” to “I’ll do something.”
(Edited by Bryan Yong)
Stridy is a non-profit organisation with a vision of an “Unlittered World” — a future where proper waste management is universal and no community lives in litter. Their mission is to galvanise a global community of individuals to create collective impact, using the Stridy App to quantify and visualise how every small effort counts. Strictly funded by donations, Stridy operates on principles of financial transparency and positive motivation, believing that environmental action should be fun, social, and collaborative rather than just a chore.
You can reach out to them at https://stridy.com
Pranav Krishna is a Singapore-based climate entrepreneur and nature lover building ventures that make sustainable living practical, visible, and commercially viable. As the founder of ShareRight and EcoCupid, he explores the many facets of sustainability—from circular economy business models to nature-inspired solutions and urban gardening—to help people and businesses live lighter on the planet.