Tissues and paper napkins, cigarette butts and pieces of glass are the most abundant ‘trash’ in the Valencian Community, as highlighted by the Libera Project.
For the fifth consecutive year, SEO / BirdLife in partnership with Ecoembes, has held a new edition of the citizen science campaign ‘1m2 for the countryside, forests and mountains’, an appointment that, coinciding with International Mountain Day – -December 11-, has mobilised more than 5,500 volunteers in the fight against ‘trash beauty’.
Thus, from December 4 to 12, they met in 346 parts of the country (78 more than the previous year) to collect data on the volume, quantity and type of garbage abandoned in the fields, forests and mountains. Throughout this period, 67,616 items of abandoned waste has been characterised and about 8.5 tons of trash removed.
Specifically, in the Valencian Community, 300 volunteers have gone to 18 points in the community, managing to characterise more than 2,300 abandoned items in areas such as the Albufera-Devesa Natural Park (Valencia), the Cabeçó d’Or (San Juan , Alacant) or El Cabo del Faro de Santa Pola (Alacant). Thus, among the garbage found in the Valencian terrestrial environments, the handkerchiefs and paper napkins, the cigarette butts and the pieces of glass stand out.
At the national level, the most commonly found and characterised waste was, in the first place, cigarette butts, followed by beverage cans, plastic pieces from 0 to 2.5 cm, plastic bottles and glass pieces.
The participating groups have used the mobile app ‘eLitter’, a pioneering work tool in the characterization of trash, developed by the associations Clean Landscape and Zero Waste, in collaboration with Libera.
The data obtained will be integrated into the database of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge and will be added to the already characterised objects that Libera collects in its ‘Garbage Barometer’.
“Urgent solution”
“The data shows that we are facing an environmental problem that needs an urgent solution. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of people, we know the type of waste that ends up in the field and we will be able to design effective strategies to end this environmental problem. focus on the responsibility of the entire society so that our natural environment is free of trash, “says Miguel Muñoz, coordinator of the Libera Project at SEO / BirdLife, in a statement.
For her part, Sara Güemes, coordinator of the Ecoembes Libera Project, declares that “it is a pride to see how the commitment of citizens increases year after year. Campaigns such as ‘1m2 for the countryside, forests and mountains’ show us that the fighting trash is a common challenge.” “Thanks to all the volunteers, we are adding knowledge about the impact of trash to focus on prevention and awareness,” she celebrates.
With this call, Libera closes its last citizen science campaign of the year after the celebration of ‘1m2 for the beaches and seas’, developed last September-October, and ‘1m2 for the rivers, reservoirs and swamps’, which it took place in the month of March. Two great moments of mobilisation in which, thanks to the commitment of nearly 10,000 volunteers, it was possible to characterise more than 136,000 objects from 596 points throughout Spain.