On 22 February 2025, members of the Rotaract Club of Mahidol University spent a day on the Chao Phraya River on stand-up paddleboards, collecting rubbish. It's an unusual project for medical students. That's partly the point.
The Chao Phraya is Bangkok's spine — 372 kilometres of waterway that has shaped the city since its founding. It also receives a significant volume of waste: plastic bottles, food packaging, polystyrene, everything that ends up in a river running through a city of ten million people.
Getting rubbish out of a river from a paddleboard is a logistical challenge. You have to balance on the board. You have to dodge river traffic. You have to reach far enough to get the floating debris without going in. You have to collect what you find, bring it back to shore, and sort it — recyclable from non-recyclable — before anything useful can be said about what you found.
The Rotaractors from Mahidol University did all of this on 22 February 2025, in a project they called "Ro' Rak Chao Phraya: Goodbye Trash."
Who They Are
The Rotaract Club of Mahidol University was established in 1969 — originally as the Rotaract Club of Ramathibodi Hospital — making it one of the oldest Rotaract clubs in Thailand. Members today are drawn from Mahidol University's medical faculties: doctors, nurses, and medical engineering students spread across several campuses who rarely have the same free afternoon, but who come together for major projects.
The Club is sponsored by the Rotary Club of Bangkok, which supports it by covering costs for District functions, attending installation ceremonies, and providing mentorship.
Why River Clean-Up and Medical Students Go Together
The connection isn't accidental. Environmental health is public health. The Chao Phraya flows through communities that depend on it for water, livelihoods, and daily transport. Plastic and chemical contamination has real downstream effects on the health of those communities.
Medical students who paddle through floating rubbish understand, from direct experience, what "environmental health" actually means. They also understand the limits: a group of fifteen people on paddleboards can clear a stretch of river; what actually changes it is upstream — waste management systems, community education, the policy decisions that determine how much reaches the water in the first place.
The workshops on waste ecology and environmental awareness that accompanied the paddleboarding were, in that sense, the more lasting part of the project.
The Club's Year
RACMU's 54th president, Preeyanat Buangoen, was installed in December 2024. Club members also helped staff the Rotary Club of Bangkok's "Spread the Magic" annual gala at the Grand Hyatt Erawan, and attended the Club's Installation Ceremony. A representative went to the Asia Pacific Rotaract Regional Conference (APRRC 2025) in Mongolia in June 2025.
These aren't peripheral activities. They're young people building the habits of service, leadership, and international engagement that will stay with them for the rest of their careers.
The Rotaract Club of Mahidol University is sponsored by the Rotary Club of Bangkok. Rotaract membership is open to people aged 18–30. Contact the Rotary Club of Bangkok for more information.