‘Waste has value’: how surfing helps Colombia solve its plastic problem

As the morning sun beats down on the Caribbean island of Tierra Bomba in Colombia, a group of schoolchildren heads towards the beach, with two carrying surfboards over their heads. The children, many of whom are barefoot, meander through the town, also called Tierra Bomba, down unkempt and littered dirt roads, past colourful tin-roofed homes and makeshift clotheslines.

As they near the beach, the spartan concrete houses give way to palm-thatched bungalows with swimming pools overlooking the sea, flanked by colourful flowers. Playa Linda’s sands are dotted with bars, parasols and loungers, the waters crisscrossed by darting jetskis.

The children excitedly bicker over the pair of surfboards as they begin their weekly lesson. One attempts to use a floating tree trunk as a makeshift board.

The surfing lessons are organised by the Amigos del Mar foundation, a local group that provides social support and teaches water sports to the community while also tackling one of the island’s biggest problems: rubbish.

In Tierra Bomba, plastic bottle caps, bags, wrappers, toys and other plastic waste constantly washes up on the white sand beaches, where it accumulates due to the lack of adequate waste collection services.

In surfing, one can find peace, happiness and a little bit of everything

Juan José Silva, surfing instructor

Amigos del Mar has set up the Olas Paz programme (known as the Clean Wave Project in English), transforming the thousands of plastic bottle caps that pollute Tierra Bomba into surfboard fins.

Last year, the organisation collected more than 7,000 bottle caps through beach cleaning programmes and by encouraging the local community to collect the caps themselves. Each surf fin comprises about 18 bottle caps, ground into tiny pieces, then melted and moulded into shape.

“The idea was that the people from Tierra Bomba, who had never picked up rubbish or recycled before, would start down this path,” says Pedro Salazar, director and founder of Amigos del Mar. “It is difficult in communities with other problems to talk about environmental education and try to change their minds on environmental issues.”

The allure of surfing, however, helps. For the children to participate in the weekly lesson, they must attend all their school classes – which include learning about the environment – throughout the week, an initiative introduced to bolster local education.

Juan José Silva, the children’s surfing instructor and himself a former student of the foundation, says: “Surf helps a lot as there are people here that have gotten lost down bad paths for not having something to distract them.

“In surfing, one can find peace, happiness and a little bit of everything,” he says. “It’s a way of having a good time.”

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Tierra Bomba is home to about 9,000 people, but it exists on the margins, overlooked by the Colombian state. From the island, the jagged backdrop of Cartagena ’s high-rise hotels and flashy apartments dominates the horizon. On the island, however, many people have no running water and few basic services, such as sewerage and energy supply.

The Colombian government has long promised to introduce a rubbish collection service, but locals say nothing has ever been implemented. Instead, a private French company picks up rubbish haphazardly with a small open-back tuk-tuk, which appears inconsistently throughout the week.

To fill the void of public services, Amigos del Mar also runs a local educational support programme, which runs extracurricular lessons on the environment, social issues and English. Last year, the programme helped 271 children.

“The waste on the ground has value, and that incentive allowed a positive change in the community,” Salazar says, sitting on the beach of El Laguito, a popular tourist area of Cartagena on the mainland opposite Tierra Bomba, his sporty chrome sunglasses reflecting the waves.

The project was so, so good that it got out of hand, which was something we didn’t expect

Pedro Salazar, founder of Amigos del Mar

He is watching the Copa América standup paddleboarding tour , in which two of his former students from Tierra Bomba, proteges of Amigos del Mar, are competing.

“We want to be a good example for the island,” says Leimer Morales shortly before competing. “Just as I could get ahead, so can others. I don’t know where we’d be without surf. Life would be very difficult – perhaps we’d be lost.”

There is only so much that Salazar and the local community of Tierra Bomba can do, however. Amigos del Mar previously operated a plastic bank, where residents could hand in collected bottle caps in exchange for household goods and products such as blenders, fans, toasters, pots and even rice. But that project is on hold.

The Olas Paz project has also stalled, as it became inundated with plastic. The organisation’s headquarters in Tierra Bomba are rammed with collected caps. Pools overflow with a mix of colourful lids, large bags tightly filled with kilos of caps are piled in a back room, and hundreds of others have been used as decorative features or pathways.

“The project was so, so good that it got out of hand, which was something we didn’t expect,” Salazar says.

“We started with about 20 people, bringing us around 2 or 3kg of plastic caps over the first three months. Suddenly, in seven months, we had almost 18 tonnes of plastic lids and more than 370 people involved in the project.

“We had to stop and rethink how to manage it because our production of surf fins and [the machines that make them] simply cannot cope.”

Local families that participated in the programme continue to collect and store bottle caps in their homes, content with helping to clean the streets, and hoping that the programme may soon have life breathed back into it.

The island’s plastic problem is aggravated by the mass tourism that Cartagena receives. The popular resort received about 624,000 tourists in 2023, a 35% surge compared with the previous year, according to local government figures.

Francisco Castillo, an environmental adviser to Cartagena’s mayor, says: “The use of plastic is one of the issues that we have to work on as it has led to plastic ending up predominantly on our beaches. It is mainly due to tourists and visitors, and these plastics are not disposed of adequately.”

Castillo admits there is a lack of infrastructure, such as recycling facilities, to deal with plastic pollution, and acknowledges that the town hall does not always prioritise the problem.

But, he says: “With our current administration, the agenda revolves entirely around environmental issues.”

Plastic pollution is one of the most severe environmental challenges worldwide. In Colombia, it is estimated that 700,500 tonnes of plastic packaging are produced annually, with only 30% recycled into new packaging, according to the WWF.

Statistics vary, but a 2019 study by the Technological University of Panama revealed that the sea along Colombia’s Caribbean coastline contains four times more microplastics than the beaches along the country’s Pacific coast.

The government’s Marine and Coastal Research Institute has reported an increase in microplastics along the country’s coastlines, and in 2019 found up to 8,000 microplastic fragments in a litre of water and 1,000 bits of microplastic in a square metre of beach on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts.

To mitigate the growing levels of plastic pollution, the Colombian government recently implemented a new law to ban eight types of single-use plastics : carrier bags in supermarkets; bags for packing fruits and vegetables; plastic packaging for magazines and newspapers; bags for laundered clothes; holders for balloons; cotton swabs; straws; and stirrers.

Castillo celebrates this move as “definitely a solution” if its implementation can be rigorously enforced.

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Much like Salazar, Castillo says the town hall’s efforts have focused on environmental education in the hope of changing the harmful habits of rubbish disposal displayed by locals and tourists, as well as investing in circular economy recycling projects.

“This task has a lot to do with the issue of environmental education,” Castillo says. “It is a slow exercise, requiring patience. But we have to work on it.”