Blue Religion organized two clean-ups in the mangrove forests in the hotel zone area in Cancun. Blue Religion volunteers had to get on kayaks to access this beautiful, but unfortunately very polluted ecosystem.
Mangrove forests are extremely valuable ecosystems to our planet and here are some of the reasons why.
These woods protect the shoreline from storms and erosion and they serve as nurseries for fish, providing them a shelter. The shade provided by the mangroves also protects coral species at risk of extinction from coral bleaching, which is caused by the warmer water temperatures. Another interesting fact is that the mangroves can store up to 10 times more of carbon than the same sized terrestrial forest. This way, they can help to fight the climate change.
As you can see, healthy mangrove ecosystems play a vital role to our environment. But „healthy“ is a crucial word in the last sentence. Pollution presents a huge threat to the mangroves. When the plastic covers the roots of the mangroves, it prevents them to absorb the CO2. This way, the plastic waste can literally suffocate the trees.
That’s why Blue Religion chose the mangrove area of the hotel zone in Cancun and organized two clean-ups there, one in July and one in October. On these events, Blue religion volunteers collected a total of 275 kilos of trash, out of which 95% was took by company Petgas and transformed into gasoline.
Due to the difficult accessibility of the area, the volunteers had to use kayaks to collect the trash from the water surrounding the mangroves. Kayaks we use for the mangorve clean-ups are provided by the company Go Kayak Cancun as a support for this cause are we would like to express our appreciation for their incredible cooperation.
It’s also worth mentioning that because of the limited space on the kayaks, on each event there were 20 volunteers who managed to collect this amount of waste. A huge thank you belongs to every single person who was a part of the Blue Religion team on these events.
Commentaires