In the summer of 2022, Andreas Noe cycled through the interior of Portugal with a single mission: to collect trash along 2370 kilometres in 55 days. A bold proposition, many would say even impossible, but it wasn’t even his first trip across the country for this purpose. It was the third. That’s why everyone knows him as The Trash Traveler.
In the same summer, in a corner near the Marina, he built an installation with cigarette butts collected on one of those trips, the 35-year-old German, trained in molecular biology, told the story of his latest adventure.
It all started with an ambition: to show that it’s not always necessary to buy new things. That’s why Andreas didn’t buy a bicycle but decided to build one from forty pieces of used bicycles. This is how Rosa was born.
Andreas managed to prove his thesis. But there were doubters. Midway through the journey, he crossed paths with two well-equipped cyclists who, upon seeing Rosa, questioned: “Is he really going to ride through Portugal with this bicycle?”.
But Rosa proved unbeatable. On a climb up a mountain, Andreas and Rosa were able to keep up with the two cyclists without any problem. They pedalled through Cascais, Sagres, Vila Real de Santo António, Serra da Estrela, Chaves, Caminha, Porto, and Nazaré. At the end, they displayed the 4599 cans and bottles collected at the Tower of Belém.
The two cyclists didn’t know, but Andreas Noe is willing to go to great lengths to change people’s mindset about one thing: trash.
The trash
Andreas Noe was born in Constance, a German city bordering Switzerland, very close to a lake, and therefore he has always been connected to nature, even though neither of his parents worked in the field of environment or science.
So connected to nature that, at the age of four, by his own choice, he began to insist on being vegetarian. He doesn’t know why, as everyone at home ate meat. “When we are children, I think we know what’s right and what’s wrong when it comes to environmental issues”, he says.
His mother tried to disguise meat on the plate, so it’s possible that he ingested some until he was six, but she eventually gave up, and Andreas became fully vegetarian.
His environmental concerns have been evident since then, but it was in Lisbon, where he came to do a PhD, that everything changed. On the nearby beaches where he surfed, he began to be alarmed.
“In winter, on beaches like Carcavelos, after a storm, plastic starts coming in through the Tagus”, he recalls. “We’re swimming in garbage.”
Ocean garbage is a concern: according to the United Nations, at least 11 million tons of plastic end up in the sea every year. Globally, there are approximately 51 trillion particles of microplastics in the oceans.
Andreas started by collecting trash and keeping it in his surfer suit. But it wasn’t enough, of course. One day, he woke up and did something crazy: he quit his job. That was an act of rebellion that led him to the beaches, where he began to document his adventures collecting trash, playing songs on his ukulele that illustrated his fight.
Over 460 days, he composed 460 songs, simple and humorous, about the oceans, climate change, trash, and plastic, which he published on his Instagram page.
The page gained some followers, but time passed, and money started to run out. At the end of the 460 days of songs, Andreas thought that maybe it was time to return to Germany, but it seemed absurd to him to go back after gaining so much awareness about a real problem. Then the pandemic came. Not knowing what to do, he had an idea: “What if I went from being alone to spreading the message with someone else?”
Collecting plastic on the beaches
Andreas contacted several Portuguese NGOs and proposed to them a walk along the country’s coast to collect plastic. The idea initially was to create a community that could join him on this walk, but because of the tough times of the pandemic, the plan ended up changing.
However, Andreas didn’t embark on this journey alone: two weeks before the big adventure, he met a film crew that volunteered to accompany him, without any guarantee of profit. “That’s what’s beautiful about this project: people came together without thinking about money”, he says.
And so began The Plastic Hike: an 832-kilometer walk along the Portuguese coast over 58 days in partnership with 100 NGOs. Throughout the journey, Andreas narrated the trip on Instagram. “As we reached more remote places, we found dead whales, a lot of plastic, and the situation was very sad.”
But not even these scenarios prevented Andreas from falling in love with the North of Portugal. “It’s more hidden than the south, but it’s more untouched.”
In the end, 1.6 tons of plastic were collected, and a community was formed at each of the points Andreas passed through. The entire adventure was documented in a documentary and artworks were created from the collected plastic. Additionally, many people thanked him: “Thank you for cleaning up”, they said.
Change mindsets
But the problem wasn’t just about cleaning up, of course. “Cleaning up shows the problem, which is the plastic.” So it’s not the solution. Minds needed to be changed. But how?
Andreas remembered cigarette butts: “People throw cigarette butts on the ground without thinking about it”, he explains. “I wanted to show that we have a choice with our actions.” Thus began a new adventure once again along the Portuguese coast over two months: the Butt Hike.
600 people joined forces, and some even sent him cigarette butts from the Azores and Madeira islands. In the end, 1.1 million cigarette butts were collected, which may seem like a lot, but in reality, it only corresponds to two and a half hours of littering in Portugal.
Once again, this couldn’t be enough. The work of this trash traveller had to continue, and so this year the message was not only about producing less waste but also about reusing. Thus, he proposed to do The Trash Cycle through the interior of Portugal on his Rosa.
This time, some even called him to give lectures in schools along the way. That’s what happened in Monção and Castro Verde, where the younger ones learned from Andreas about pollution in cities and climate change. Now, the future lies in continuing to teach the younger ones.
Whatever the plans, they always involve Portugal. And Lisbon. “I like living here,” he says. “For the nature, the waves, the variety. It’s such a small country where there’s everything, and Lisbon has so many cultures. Whenever I’m exploring, I fall in love.”
*This article was originally posted in Portuguese on 07/18/2022. It’s now updated and republished in English and with the People of Lisbon video
Ana da Cunha
Nasceu no Porto, há 28 anos, mas desde 2019 que faz do Alfa Pendular a sua casa. Em Lisboa, descobriu o amor às histórias, ouvindo-as e contando-as na Avenida de Berna, na Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
✉ ana.cunha@amensagem.pt
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