Plastic Pollution: Good News & Bad News

The bad news is Nicaragua is a hotspot for plastic bottle pollution. The good news is that our outstanding community of coastal cleanup volunteers did an excellent job of picking them up at our coastal clean up last fall. This serves two purposes: first, volunteers got the plastic away from the coastline; second, knowing where the garbage is can help prioritize global cleanup efforts.

From the International Coastal Cleanup Report:

One item collected in large numbers in a particular region can point decision-makers towards specific solutions, as in Nicaragua where volunteers found over 70,000 plastic bottles during the 2009 Cleanup—an average of 11 plastic bottles per volunteer. To put the Nicaragua statistic in perspective, only the United States picked up more bottles as a country, and the much larger US has 28 times more volunteers cleaning its shores.