Our approach was to meet first local people and NGO’s to discuss the problems, to learn and to analyze the processes. One of the issues was of course, that there were too less people to collect all plastic and garbage from the beaches and coastlines.

Like some other NGO’s, we provided some money to put a prize on the plastic and to get some people from the street, especially the poor and homeless, which have to get the money for the next meal. After some days, we had about 60 – 70 people helping us. And after 5 weeks, about 96’000 plastic bottles were collected. We paid for each bottle 5 €uro Cent, which was probably too much, but effective. At the end, this exercise cost us 5’000 €uro. Unfortunately, we had no more budget. Next time, we hope, we can count also on some donations, since it would be easy to scale up the whole process and to gather some millions of bottles. At the moment, everything is paid privately by our team.

After some days, we realized, that most of the plastic bags were still on the beach. There is an official garbage disposal, but obviously only for official bags. So, we had to organize with our friends a truck to help us and to get the bags from the beach.