A marine conservation group named Sea of Life has launched its report for its Trashblitz 2025 audit - which tracks the volume of garbage in Belize's waters.
The report focuses on the type of garbage being accumulated and the brands of single use plastics. We spoke with Paulita Bennett-Martin who told us more about the findings:
Paulita Bennett-Martin, Director, Sea of Life
"So 67% of all the waste that we cataloged across the country was plastic or a material that was partially plastic and partially something else. And we're seeing that a lot of the schools around the country have a high number of water and, um, food packaging, so that seems to be something that's showing up a lot, is single-use packaging for food and drinks. We're also seeing, though, that there's a decrease when we bring refillable water stations onto a campus. There's a strong decrease in the amount of single-use plastics that we find in the litter and in the waste streams on those school campuses."
"We do this pride campaign with a lot of organizations here in Belize City, and so when we go out into a neighborhood and we clean up for less than one hour, we haul in sometimes 60 to 70 full bags of trash within that hour. So that lets you know how much waste there is out there."
"Another thing that we need to think about is how to invest more in citizen science and empowering people with knowledge. So what we found between last year's, um, Trash Blitz report and this year's Trash Blitz report was there was a much higher level of knowledge of what types of materials people were counting in the audits. So we're empowering people to also make their own decisions through the Trash Blitz."
If you want to see the report you can find it at Seaoflife.org.
