Some 20,000 volunteers took part in a beach clean-up Sep. 16 in Venezuela, targeting 300 areas along the Caribbean, as well as around lakes and riverbanks, coinciding with the end of school vacation. “We also classify and inventory the garbage we collect. The experiences of recent years indicate that the waste associated with tourism, especially plastics, are the main pollutants of our beaches,” Maury Marcano, spokesman for the initiative, organized by the Foundations for the Defense of Nature, told Tierramérica ahead of the clean-up.

Last year, thousands of volunteers on 179 beaches collected 755,000 kilos of waste in 13,400 garbage bags. The annual beach clean-up is financed by big Venezuelan private companies.