Los Altos de Eros is excited to announce a new partnership with a truly inspirational organization; The Clean Wave. The Clean Wave focuses on energizing and enabling communities to be empowered to make meaningful impacts and zero waste commitments. This organization has had real, tangible impact through orchestrating beach clean up events and participating in the development of zero waste community projects. The Clean Wave is focused on creating a plastic free future, with the goal of cleaning all six-hundred of Costa Rica’s beaches, once a week! With the help of local communities, and you, we can all make this planet a little cleaner.

Plastics Are a Problem

        Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues, as rapidly increasing production of disposable plastic products overwhelms the world’s ability to deal with them. Up to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic enters the oceans every year. That is the equivalent of a truckload of plastic entering the oceans every minute! About 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since the 1950s, the weight of roughly a billion elephants or 47 million blue whales. It’s estimated that there are five trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans, enough to circle the Earth over 400 times. 1 in 3 fish caught for human consumption contains plastic. Even crustaceans studied at the oceans deepest point, Marianas Trench, were found to have ingested plastic.

        Plastics have truly permeated to every part of our planet. The major recycling programs are not cutting it either. Only about 9% of all plastic has been recycled, 12% has been burned (creating more pollution) and the remaining 79% has ended up in landfills or the environment where it can take many hundreds of years to decompose, if at all. Countries like Canada, the U.S., and the UK export their plastic waste to various “recycling” programs in countries in Asia and Africa, offloading their trash problem to other parts of the world where it inevitably ends up in our oceans, and on our beaches.

The Clean Wave in Action

        At the core of The Clean Wave is getting communities involved in beach clean ups. That is what started this movement and it’s where a majority of the impact is generated. The damage to the environment is so clear in Costa Rica, because you can see it from the most popular beaches to even the most secluded and remote beaches, plastics washing up from the ocean are everywhere. This is what inspired action and formed a simple solution: clean the beaches. Since its beginning in 2017, The Clean Wave has been organizing groups of locals and tourists alike to hit the beaches to pick up litter. Not only are they putting boots on the ground to clean up the mess, but they are also organizing a number of community projects to help Tamarindo reach the goal of being a zero waste community. 

        One of these projects is a community composting campaign. This is a community-initiated action to remove organic waste from the municipal waste system by taking responsibility for the communities own waste. This project rejects the idea that organic “waste” is waste at all, but rather a source of valuable nutrients that can be returned to the soil and used to grow food and regenerate our natural ecosystems.Community composting on this scale has been carried out successfully around the world as an approach to intercepting organic waste and there are abundant models to use as a guide throughout the development of this project. By keeping “organic waste” within a local circular system, this not only reduces the negative impact on the environment, but it also has a positive impact on our environment and the community as a whole.

        Another important community project put forth by The Clean Wave focuses on protecting one of Costa Rica’s most important resources: Monkeys. This campaign uses fundraising to repair, maintain, and install monkey bridges as vital safe pathways for monkeys throughout Guanacaste, Costa Rica, because without monkeys there is no paradise. This is a community initiated action to address the loss of critical and unique species in our region, and maintain the biodiversity that makes Costa Rica Special. It first seeks to evaluate the routes of passage and connectivity of forest cover in both Tamarindo and Playa Grande for the placement of Monkey Bridges. This project is part of The Clean Wave community’s greater mission towards environmental protection within our community of Tamarindo and the greater community of our neighbors in Guanacaste. This project is in collaboration with, and in alignment with the mission of the organization SalveMonos.

        Today, The Clean Wave is growing our community while staying focused on the core actions of beach clean ups and community building. The Clean Wave is working with partners, like us at Los Altos de Eros, to develop these community projects to continue pushing Tamarindo towards a zero waste community. We hope to set a standard and become an example for other communities to follow. With the help of sponsors, donations, and volunteers, The Clean Wave is committed to spreading this awareness and activism across all of Costa Rica, and hopefully the world.

How You Can Help

        There are many ways for you to participate. The Clean Wave needs all members of the community to do their part, big or small. Not just Costa Ricans, The Clean Wave enlists expats, business owners, tourists, nomads, farmers, vendors, activists & volunteers. You can attend an event, donate, pick up some trash on the beach, or just commit to changing a behavior towards a zero waste practice and kick the habit of using single use plastics! If you stay at Los Altos de Eros, all you have to do is ask our team and we will be thrilled to set you up and provide transportation to the next Clean Wave event. If you don’t plan on visiting Costa Rica, you can still donate to this important cause. Be a part of the change and ride The Clean Wave!