Record Breaking Earth Day Cleanup

It was a record-breaking Earth Day Cleanup on Saturday 27 April, with more than 100 teams and nearly 3000 volunteers of all ages who came out on Saturday morning to keep Cayman beautiful. Piles of trash bags lined the sides of the streets, waiting for Department of Environmental Health (DEH) trucks to collect them.

Planet Vs. Plastics was the theme for this year’s island wide cleanup. Plastics do more than litter – they pose a real threat to marine life in our seas and oceans, and microplastics are also an – as yet – unknown risk for human health.

“If we don’t take care of our earth, we’ll soon have no earth,” said 11-year-old Maya Campbell – who worked to clear up trash along Safe Haven Drive with the Dart cleanup group.

“If we don’t take care of our earth, we won’t have one anymore – it will be uninhabitable,” said 12-year-old Savannah Bodden.

Chamber CEO Wil Pineau thanked all sponsors for providing the funds, resources and volunteers for the cleanup.

Kerrilyn Powery from the NCB group – an Earth Day sponsor, organised a large team of volunteers too: “We’re a development and construction company that’s local and we look out for our communities. With sustainability in mind, we want to take care as much as possible of the natural environment and Cayman being what it is, we want to preserve it.

Whitney Foster, Marketing and Events Coordinator at Cayman Turtle Centre said that there is always strong support from the staff: “We participate every year in the Chamber of Commerce’s Earth Day Beach Cleanup - it’s very important to our values to be out in the community advocating for cleaning up our beaches and protecting our environment because Cayman’s green sea turtle population is at risk from pollution, so it’s a really special opportunity for us to connect with our community, and clean up our beaches together”

PROVEN Bank’s Renzo Escalante said: “The Chamber has done a wonderful job getting all these volunteers and organisations together, and we’re happy to do our part. We were lucky enough to have 21 volunteers from our staff come out this morning, and they picked up a lot of trash, although less than in other years, and we had some good camaraderie with our team, over at Barkers Beach and we look forward to being a sponsor next year.”

Special thanks to this year’s sponsors:

• Dart

• Cayman National Corporation

• Health City Cayman Islands

• NCB Group

• Water Authority

• RBC

• CSC/Intertrust Group

• Foster’s Supermarket

• Rotary Club of Grand Cayman

• KPMG

• Heritage Holdings Ltd.

• CG BritCay

• Rawlinson & Hunter

• Consolidated Water Company Ltd.

• Pestkil Ltd.

• IQ EQ Corporate Services (Cayman) Limited

• Tortuga Cayman

• PROVEN Bank (Cayman) Limited

• Cayman Turtle Conservation and Education Centre Ltd.

• Carey Olsen

• Caribbean Utilities Company, Ltd.

• Mourant

• Marsh Management Services Cayman Ltd.

• FundBank Ltd.

• Cayman Cost-U-Less Ltd.

• Walkers (Cayman) LLP