After Mijas took first place in Spain in Ecovidrio’s Green Flags campaign, the initiative continued on Thursday 13th in the town with a clean-up of El Chaparral beach. The campaing, which rewarded Mijas as the participating municipality that recycled the most glass during the summer, concluded with the participation of 120 students from IES Sierra de Mijas.

The objective was twofold. On the one hand, to remove waste; on the other, to use the Mar Nova app, as explained by María Cabrera from Paisaje Limpio, to catalogue it and send the data to the Ministry of the Environment to study its origin. Hugo Recio, from Ecovidrio, described the Green Flag campaign as a “healthy rivalry” between 51 Andalusian municipalities to promote the sustainability of glass, a material with “infinite lives”.

 

The students demonstrated their awareness. “I think a lot about animals, about the rubbish that accumulates in the sea and affects fish”, said student Kiara Giordano. Her classmate Adrián González added that he already takes action at home, using “glass bottles to reuse them” instead of plastic.

In total, 90 kilos of waste were collected, mainly cigarette butts, wipes and plastic fragments. The councillor for Beaches, Daniel Gómez Teruel (PP), described the clean-up as a “symbolic act”, as “we found the beach very clean because we work on it all year round”, thanking the work of the Town Hall’s Operational Services and Basic Income departments.

Mijas’ victory in the campaign was due to the high level of participation, with 95% of hoteliers involved. Almost 542,000 kilos of glass were collected in the summer, 30,000 more than in 2024. The councillor for Cleanliness, Eloy Belmonte (Vox), highlighted the savings of 70,000 euros that this represented. Belmonte insisted on refuting “the stigma that we have that all waste is mixed afterwards. That is not the case”. The councillor concluded that Mijas has set itself the goal of “increasing these figures even further”.

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