Students from the Cristòfol Despuig institute pick up waste in the Ribera de Tortosa promenade

The 1st year ESO students of the Institut Cristòfol Despuig have carried out two days of cleaning on the Ribera de Tortosa promenade, next to the Ebro. On Friday a first group already acted and this Monday it took a short time to refill garbage bags in the same section.

The students were “impressed” with the amount of waste thrown away. “It makes you think that we are a little dirty,” Dídac lamented.

The initiative is part of the school’s adherence to the European Let’s Clean Up campaign and the Erasmus program with which they work on sustainability and natural heritage in a transversal way. In Tortosa the project has had the collaboration of the Platform in Defense of the Ebre (PDE) and the City Council.

Rosa and Dídac, first-year ESO students at the Institut Cristòfol Despuig in Tortosa, were surprised to find so much waste in a stretch of a few hundred meters when they walked this Monday morning.

Rosa has been surprised by the large number of cans and bottles they have found, and Dídac has been surprised by the many clothes they have collected.

Surrounded by their classmates, they recognize that they are a generation “more aware of the preservation of the environment” because as children they have been educated to be so. They assure that they never throw garbage on the ground, that they know how to recycle, they teach their parents, and that they have the courage to recriminate the uncivil actions they see.

The group of first-year ESO students carried out the collection accompanied by the teachers and promoters of Le’ts Clean Up in the centre. Àngel Mulet, coordinator of Green Schools at the Institut Cristòfol Despuig, and Dario Sabaté, coordinator of the Erasmus program, have also invited representatives of the PDE and the Tortosa City Council.

Councilors Francesc Vallespí, Marga Abelló and Víctor Grau have also put on their gloves and accompanied the young people in this cleaning action. When they finished filling the bags they were carrying, they made the selection and wrote down the data that they will transfer to the campaign.