Once again citizeship supports this initiative, promoted by the SEUR Foundation and the City Council, to help minors with medical needs
Benidorm contributes more than 1.5 million bottle caps to the charity campaign "Caps for a New Life"
Recycling these caps has prevented the emission of nearly 5 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the equivalent of travelling around the Earth by plane.
Benidorm citizenship has once again rallied behind the SEUR Foundation's "Caps for a New Life" campaign, with which Benidorm City Council collaborates to promote the recycling of caps for a charitable purpose: to provide underprivileged children with medical treatment not covered by the healthcare system or materials that help them alleviate the physical problems they suffer and cannot obtain through other means. The Councilor for the Environment, Mónica Gómez, announced this Thursday the results of this campaign for 2024, in which the Foundation collected more than 1.5 million caps deposited by Benidorm residents in the heart-shaped containers installed throughout the city.
Gómez emphasized that "the money raised from recycling these caps is used to help children with medical needs, so we are contributing not only to reducing our environmental impact but also to improving the quality of life of many children and their families." She also explained that the SEUR Foundation is responsible for collecting and delivering these caps to a recycling company that provides a payment per ton at market price.
In the case of Benidorm, the amount collected in the six heart-shaped containers installed by the City Council at different points throughout the city amounted to a total of 1,575,000 caps, with a total weight of 3.15 tons, which has translated into a financial contribution of 630 euros, according to the councillor.
She also indicated that the recycling process of these caps has prevented the emission of 4.73 tons of CO2—the main gas causing climate change—into the atmosphere, equivalent to 42,114 kilometres of flight or just over one complete flight around planet Earth. Continuing with these equivalences, to more graphically demonstrate the impact of this initiative in Benidorm, the Environment Minister pointed out that, placed in a row, all the caps would cover a distance of 47 kilometres and that, furthermore, the proper management of this waste would be equivalent to the CO2 absorbed by a forest of 788 trees in one year or the CO2 emitted by an apartment with the heating on continuously for almost 19 years.
"In Benidorm, we have six containers installed to facilitate the collection of caps in all neighbourhoods," said Gómez, who specified that they are located in La Cala (Secretario Juan Baldoví Street), Rincón de Loix (Juan Fuster Zaragoza Street), Els Tolls (Avenida Bélgica), Colonia Madrid (Llorca Linares Social Center), and two in the downtown area: one on Maravall Street and Plaza Neptuno, and another on Avenida de l'Aigüera, very close to the Town Hall.
She also noted that since 2011, when the "Caps for a New Life" project began, nearly 200 children from all over Spain have benefited from funding for their medical or orthopaedic treatments, with funds raised exceeding €1.3 million. One of them was Leo, a young resident of Benidorm, who received €3,200 a few years ago to cover his aquatic therapy sessions as a treatment for Hirschsprung's disease, a condition linked to Down syndrome.
For this reason, Mónica Gómez expressed her gratitude for "the involvement of the citizens of Benidorm, who from the very beginning have fully supported this initiative, which seeks to improve the quality of life of the youngest children," and that "in addition to this charitable purpose, it also has an impact on the environment by promoting plastic recycling, thereby reducing CO2 emissions."