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The Caribe Circular Project helps to reduce the demand for plastic by the hotel sector and thus reduce the pollution of the Caribbean Sea.
Booggie, a community leader in charge of the beach cleanup program in Puerto Viejo, tells me that 150 meters of beach are cleaned every week by local volunteers. Among the observations they find mostly plastic caps, cigarette butts and single-use packaging. This is consistent with international data indicating that 80% of marine debris is plastic.
One factor that influences waste management in the canton of Talamanca is that the municipal waste management system must be optimized to provide adequate coverage, as established in the Municipal Solid Waste Management Plan of the Municipality of Talamanca. Currently, highly visited destinations such as the Puerto Viejo area do not have recyclable waste collection.
Therefore, any local action that can be taken to reduce plastic consumption will contribute to reducing local pollution. Both individual actions, as well as those of the tourism sector, especially operators of tourism services, such as lodging, food and recreational activities.
In accordance with the conservationist and sustainable tourism discourse that has highlighted the country, for the hotel sector in the Caribbean zone, it is very beneficial to be part of a project that created a validated action route for hotels to reduce the amount of plastic consumed and thus avoid incidents in the final disposal.
This is one of the objectives of the Caribe Circular project, which, in addition to contributing to improving the environmental quality of the Caribbean Sea (by reducing local demand for plastic), seeks to promote the circular economy.
The concept of circular economy stems from the idea of creating local economic linkages by facilitating productive chains within the community, where the capital generated by the operation circulates within the community instead of escaping to other destinations.
This specific Caribe Circular project creates tools and action routes that allow quantifying the plastic consumed by hotels. Measuring annually the weight, the number of units purchased and the economic cost for the operation. From this, scenario analyses are generated to reduce the consumption of plastic products.
In addition, measures to reduce the use of single-use plastic products are implemented under different parameters such as the following:
- Focusing on plastics Priority 1
- Search for bulk purchase options
- Packaging with the smallest environmental footprint, and the best disposal option
- By purchasing from local distributors, it is possible to negotiate on the type of packaging and reuse of packaging.
We look forward to projects such as the Global Initiative on Tourism and Plastics, which brings together the tourism sector around a common vision of how to tackle the root causes of plastic pollution, and enables businesses, governments and other tourism stakeholders to lead by example in the shift to a circular plastics economy.
Learn more about the initiative here
