2019 Beach Cleanup Day / Bocas Team Ocean!
It has been a while since I shared an environmental post with all of you. Since every September we celebrate the month of the Oceans, I thought about sharing with you what we did in our community of the Caribbean side of Panama in Bocas del Toro honoring the International Coastal Cleanup.
It makes me happy to be a member of the the Cero Basura Bocas group that is working towards a better and cleaner environment and played an important part in this event.
Once again, together as a team we managed to organize a massive beach and underwater cleanup this past 29th of September. And just like last year, we had good organizational support from other organizations, from local citizens and also tourists.
Here is the post written about the 2018 Cleanup Day!: Bocas del Toro Suit Up for Clean-up!
Just as a reminder:
The annual International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) is a campaign organized by the (Ocean Conservancy)[https://oceanconservancy.org/]. This happens during the month of September around the world, kids and adults get together to collect as much trash as possible from coast lines, mangroves, underwater and beaches.
As some of you already know, I became a happy father. Between my family, my job, my crypto studies, etc, it has been quite difficult to keep dedicating the same amount of time to the social responsibility part of our lives. However, I still try.
At first I thought we were not going to be able to organize it this year, but my friend and colleague from Cero Basura Group, Mr. Angel Gonzalez, was not going to let the cause down, neither was I, so we managed to organize our time.
You may think… it’s just a cleanup at the beach, yes it is, but this is huge. It is probably the only big massive cleanup of the archipielago throughout the year where hundreds of people participate and several different areas of all islands are cleaned up. In this activity, local people, tourists, businesses and governmental entities get together to make this happen properly.
What was done to coordinate it?
We invited the same people last year to our meetings, specially the leaders of other organizations and entities. In this time we also invited governmental entities to participate: Environmental Ministry, Tourism Authority, the Municipality and the Authority of Aquatic Resources.
After knowing who was going to be committed for this occasion, everything started to flow and we delegated responsibilities for leaders of different areas or cleanup points.
We received donations from other organizations from Panama City: trash bags, gloves, printed forms, pencils. We also published on the different facebook groups in our community the need of food and water for participants, luckily we had enough for them!
We finally held a last informative meeting 3 days before the event, in this meeting we gave to each leader of cleanup area all the materials for their groups.
These were all the different places we were able to organize for the cleanup:
Regarding underwater cleanup, this year only 3 Diving Schools participated to collect trash underwater.
The way each organized their volunteers was by setting up groups of 5 or 4 people: 2 persons holding 1 trash bag each, 2 more collecting the trash from the beach, and the last one writing down the data of trash being collected. Same as last year, the only change we applied this year was to also separate plastics. It happened to be that there is a new recycling center on mainland, so we had the idea to also logistically organize a transport for all the plastics collected to that center. Isn’t this great?
This is the format we used to do an inventory of the trash collected:
It is important to mention something interesting. We are very happy to see that this year we barely found single use plastic bags. This is thanks to the Municipal agreement # 14 of March 22nd 2017 that we were also able to push.
You can find more info about the International Coastal Cleanup Day campaign here
Here are some nice pictures we took:
The results:
We have successfully cleaned 12 different beaches, 6 mangroves, and 2 different underwater spots by a total of 261 people. We made a total of 11,300 solid waste of different sizes!
It is quite impressive to see all the waste that was collected, the majority being plastics. Here are the details in the following image (the information is in spanish):
Last year we had the intention to make this clean up more often, but unfortunately it didn’t happen. Although we will continue to do this every September. Hopefully other organizations or groups would like to organize another massive cleanup later in the year.
If you were aware of the International Coastal Cleanup and did something similar, please comment below and let me know how it was.
I made a video for you to enjoy and see what we did that day:
https://d.tube/#!/v/el-cr/oq02omjn676
Thank you!
Info Source: