English version
On November 18 I hosted a Local Guides to clean from plastic pollution Jesolo beach.
The meet-up is part of the program Local Guides Clean The World Project
If you want to know why we do this, and hoe is gone, here below is the full story
Feeling at Home, Cleaning Home: from Local to Global
Home is where we live, and I want my place to be clean and beautiful.
Cleaning Home is, for me, very important. More than “Cleaning the World”. Because I am a Local Guide, and my place is Home.
This is not a contradiction: Local Guides is a global, worldwide program so, if everyone of us care about our Homes, we can say for sure that Local Guides (everyone of us taking care of his own place) Clean The World.
Because the World is where we live, a World where we are same and equal, in our big Home.
There are many reasons for loving a LocalGuidesCleanTheWorld Meet-up, but some of them have a special place in my heart.
Crossing the river
What we now call “LocalGuidesCleanTheWorld“ was born during the first days of January 2018, on the left side of Piave River, during a walk with Antonella.
We love the sea during the Winter season. After a few minutes walking, a colorful patch of plastic bottle caps caught our attention. At that moment we began to think about the need to clean this beach.
From there, we thought all the beaches in the world are in a similar predicament. Bits of trash found here and there like what we saw that cold January 2018 day, that had to be cleaned, the transition was short.
Ten and a half months later, we are cleaning a beach, on the right side of the same river, a few kilometers from where CleanTheWorld was born. We have crossed the river, but this is still “Home”
Acting in Emergency
Jesolo Meet-up has been organized in a very short time, for responding to an Ecological Emergency.
A “perfect storm” happened the North of Italy on October 29th. A week of storm “red alert” with heavy rain and wind at more than 150 Km/h hit this northern Italy area hard. During this week, in the Alps, we lost more than 10 millions trees, some roads, some bridges, some houses.
When the water lowered, a lot more plastic than normal made it to the beach. We had to respond quickly, to clean the beach before the storm surges, that we normally have during the Winter, pushes out these plastic out to sea and pollutes the sea too.
The power of a community: Working Together
This was, for me, the most impressive things. We were not alone. A group of citizens, faster than me, was able to organize a cleanup for November 11. They were expecting to have 80 to 100 people to join, but they were completely taken back when 350 people showed up, highly motivated and ready to clean. Well organised by Simone Andreetta and Matteo Giusto,
in a day they cleaned the dirtiest part of the beach, reducing dramatically the risk of pollution of the area… Thanks to Gianni Dalla Mora for the following picture
On the following Sunday we partnered together, coordinating our two groups and divided the beach area. 40 people showed up for my LGCTW meetup. 150 showed Simone and Matteo. It was incredible: we started at 9:30 and before 13:30 all of the 12.5 km of beach was cleaned.
Home is clean now. We know that during the winter more plastic will make it on to the beach, but the big storm’s effects of extra trash and debris on it has been removed and will not make it out to sea.
I have tried to summarize all the story in a short video, for you to be there with us.
Finally, here below is the Recap
When I proposed the meet-up, of course my idea was to start from the dirtiest point, near the mouth of the river. So I submitted a meet-up for that position then …
Well, then, for the first time, I had to change the position of a meet-up because that part of the beach had already been cleaned by the huge group coordinated by Simone and Matteo. Chapeau. This brought tears of joy and happiness to see my community in action already.
We meet a 9:15. A large group of boy scout, plus a group of Local Guides, plus some colleagues from my company, all with family and children. Just the time for a group photo.
The day was cold and windy. We distributed ourselves to cover the whole width of the beach, organised in small groups. We had bags and gloves, distributed by the waste company. At 11:00 Sara joined as from Simone’s group, for taking photo and documenting the cleanup action.
The bags were heavy, completely filled of plastic. Bottles, caps (a lot of caps), broken toys, and more. at 11:30 a group volunteers from “protezione civile” (civil protection) with an an off-road vehicle reached us, to collect all the bags and transport them to the collection points. At 12:45 our beach portion was completely cleaned.
“Hi Ermes, how are you?”
“Hi Simone, here is everything done, what about you?”
“We are leaving now, we finished too”
This was the call that marked the end of the cleanup. The 12.5 Km of beach had been completely cleaned
Here below the links to the photo album.
Via la plastica - Giornate ecologiche FB page
Local Guides Clean The World is a Local Guides project. Follow us on Local Guides Connect and on the social channels with the 'hashtag #LocalGuidesCleanTheWorld
Thanks for being in the meet-up to:
Alessandra, Mattia, Matteo, Sabrina, Deborah, Anna, Alice, Nicola , Klaudia, Michael, Ama, Giulia , Edoardo, Lorenzo, Jole, Francesca, Filippo, Jonas, Irene, Sofia, Pietro, Davide, Andrea, Sara, Matteo, Rita, Beatrice, Valentina, Piergiorgio, Enrica, Elisabetta, Vittorio, Luca, Cristina, Carlo, Chiara
Special thanks to Sara Scarpa for the pictures
