Uniting environmental commitment and deeply felt spirituality, WASTE MANDALA won awards at numerous festivals around the world. It portrays a group of volunteers known as the Green Soldiers who in 2011 began collectin the trash abandoned on the peaks of the Himalayas and in Nepal’s sacred areas. In the collective imagination, Nepal is a fabled land of pristine nature, temples and sacred sites. Few people are aware of its underside: a land devastated by plastic and rubbish generated by mass tourism and the rapid spread of consumerism in an otherwise archai civilization. The Green Soldiers are an army led by Achut Gurung, who, like a Bollywood version of Don Quixote, battles the mountains of plastic under which indifference, scorn, ignorance and, above all, a gradual and inexorable loss of cultural identity are hiding. Today, after years of collecting garbage, the Green Soldiers want to leave a lasting mark, reappropriate an ancient symbol and reconstruct harmony and beauty, using something that is universally considered waste. On May 3, 2014, in the center of one of Kathmandu’s most sacred squares, the Green Soldiers created an enormous Mandala, made not of sand but of plastic gathered from the four corners of Nepal. It is the symbolic beginning of change that not even the terrible earthquake in April 2015 was able to eradicate.