Applause and well-deserved recognition to the National District Mayor’s Office (ADN) for its “Plastics for Schoolchildren” campaign, an activity during which last Sunday it collected more than 7.2 million plastic bottles that it exchanged for school supplies for the 2024-2025 school year.
This is the second campaign by the capital’s mayor’s office focused on collecting single-use plastics, which are highly polluting and take decades (in the best of cases) to degrade. In January, on the occasion of Three Kings’ Day, the event “Plastics for Toys” took place for the fourth consecutive year, which encourages people to preserve the environment, with which more than three million plastic bottles were collected.
The thousands of people who came to the site of the activity on Sunday, from all the municipalities of Greater Santo Domingo, received parcels with electronic tablets in exchange for the plastic they handed out.
This is an effort to be imitated, in this case by all the mayors, who, regardless of their own resources, could obtain the support of entities and companies for this type of initiative, as Carolina Mejía, mayor of the DN, diligently did, with the support of Banco Popular and Propagas.
As part of the complementary “Plastics for Schoolchildren” scheme, the collected bottles are delivered to the Botellas de Amor Foundation, which transforms them into flexible plastics for furniture used in playgrounds, among other destinations.
It is a commendable initiative to involve children, parents and the community in the collection of these materials that are thrown everywhere and almost never where they should be, and that pollute our neighborhoods when they end up underground or almost always in ravines, in waterways and finally in the sea, where they threaten marine life; or in drains, where they block the drains and cause flooding with every rain.
Reducing the use of plastic, replacing supermarket packaging with cloth bags or cardboard boxes, eliminating disposable or foam cups, and preferring drinks in glass containers would help to better preserve our natural resources.
Awareness campaigns should be launched in schools and elsewhere, and laws should be required to regulate or prohibit their use.
Actions such as ADN can begin, which would lead to leaving a cleaner and healthier environment for future generations.
