First Minga 2022 in Santa Marianita - Manta with Ecoplayas

We started the year by participating in a new environmental remediation minga. With rainy and cloudy weather, and cold sea winds that kept us company throughout the day. We started the first minga of 2022 with Ecoplayas in its environmental education program #LlévateTuBasura at Punta La Barca beach, Santa Marianita - Ecuador.

78 volunteers participated in this activity, who, from different organizations such as the Puríssima company, the Municipality of Manta, and youth groups such as Mingas por el Mar, Jovenes por el Cambio, Jovenes de Otra Planeta Pensamiento Positivo, and the Universidad Laica Eloy Alfaro de Manabí (ULEAM) came together to give all our efforts to clean 500 linear meters of beach. The objective was to collect the largest amount of waste in the time frame of one hour. Within the waste found we find plastic, wood, paper, ropes, mesh, rubber, cigarette butts, among other inorganic waste that takes hundreds of years to decompose and that reduces the flora and fauna of marine ecosystems every year. Unleashing an atrocious environmental imbalance, despite our continuous efforts the damage is still palpable to unimaginable magnitudes.

Within the minga, the volunteers were divided into two groups, the first group was used to collect all the garbage that was on the beach, where the amount of 50.83kg of waste was obtained. And the second group went to the hunt for Nurdles or Pellets, known as Siren's Tears, which carried out the task of sifting the sand and finding these small microplastics that contaminate and harm our marine fauna since they confuse it with food and causes a false fullness, which in the short term can kill them. On this day, 663 units of Nurdles were collected.

As part of our social responsibility as a company, we are committed to continuing to participate in activities organized by Ecoplayas, which with its educational campaign #LlévateTuBasura has managed to remove the garbage cans from the beach and replace them with educational signs urging tourists and the community in general to When they visit the beaches, all the waste they generate is stored and taken to a place where they can be disposed of correctly. Thus, together we make sure not to leave waste in the sand. As the mingas have developed, Ecoplayas has been able to compare the results of each of these activities to measure the real impact of the educational campaign.

Something that filled us with great joy and satisfaction is that in this minga compared to that of August 2021, more volunteers have joined and we have been able to do a much more productive job. We hope to continue seeing more people interested in making a real change for the environment. At the end of the minga, we distribute our soaps made from Palo Santo wood to guarantee disinfection by any bacteria that may occur in our volunteers.

In this minga we were able to show the remarkable reduction of waste compared to the results obtained in our first mingas in this same space. With which we can conclude that replacing garbage cans with educational signs #LlevateTuBasura does work. We hope that soon many beaches replicate this initiative where education and responsibility is our fundamental pillar, only in this way can we mitigate the contamination of our beaches and achieve a better place where we can all enjoy its beauty.

For cleaner beaches #LlevateTuBasura