CELEBRATING SEVEN YEARS OF WORK IN CHILE – #FORTHEOCEANS
Stretching over 4,000km from north to south, Chile’s vast coastline traces a path along arid deserts, rocky cliffs, thriving wetlands, windswept surf breaks and finally down to the icy inlets of Patagonia. The country’s geography is extremely diverse, but plastic pollution, industrial fishing and the loss of blue carbon ecosystems are a common threat – even inland, away from the sea. As our country program in Chile starts its eighth year, we catch up with team leader Rodrigo Farias Moreno after a very busy 2024.
Q&A WITH Rodrigo Farias Moreno, PARLEY CHILE
So Parley Chile was set up in 2017, and you’ve just had your biggest year ever, right?
Correct – 2024 was our seventh year and our busiest one so far. We always try to set an annual goal, usually something like 50 cleanups. This year we set a new goal to conduct and support 75 cleanups in continental Chile alone, then we realized that adding our work in Rapa Nui, where the plan was to do 25 cleanups, made it 100 cleanups – so we thought let’s go for it. In the end, Parley Chile and our partners ended the year with a total of 126 cleanups logged.
That’s amazing! Tell us about the geographical diversity of the places you worked. Chile is a very long, thin country – are you working across all different types of coastline and environment?
Yeah, Chile is amazing. Beyond our deserts, glaciers and mountains, we have more than 4,000 kilometers of beautiful ocean coastline – but that means we have different realities for pollution based on the local culture, communities and industries. For instance we have more mining in the north of Chile, and the salmon industry and wider fishing industry in the south. So that means that we have different types of environmental issues, and different types of plastic pollution. In some places, we can focus on microplastics and beach debris. In others, we deal with lines, buoys and ghost nets from the fishing industry. In other places it’s more the tourism aspect, especially if there’s no effective waste management.
Tell us about one of your final cleanups, in Laguna San Rafael National Park.
The idea was to end these hundred cleanups with an ambitious expedition or something unusual – so we traveled into the heart of Patagonia to explore how plastic pollution is affecting even these places, which we think of as ‘pristine’. We camped for a week in Laguna San Rafael – a coastal lake located in the Aysén Region that’s home to a 30,000-year-old glacier, and lots of stunning icebergs floating in the water. Access was pretty challenging, but we managed to conduct a number of cleanups. I was pretty surprised to find so much debris from the fishing industry, inside a national park. We found that about 90% of plastic waste there was directly from the fishing industry.
It sounds like, in all these places you work, plastic from the fishing industry is the common problem?
I think for sure the fishing industry, even the artisanal fishermen, it's a common element that we find in each of our cleanups. From fishing nets, trays, the hooks to these fish aggregating devices and boxes, lots and lots of plastic boxes. We try to clean remote locations, super remote locations, because that’s where a lot of this waste accumulates. This year, it was super special because we were able to do cleanups in the deep north and in the deep south. We cleaned from Arica, the northern frontier, to Punta Arenas, which is the south frontier – and the numbers are crazy. Actually, our biggest cleanup in history was 20 tons, that was in Arica in March with local organization Arica Unidos por el Mar.
“I’m actually super optimistic, despite the amount of debris we find. Something is changing on a societal level. it feels like the movement is really growing.”
Rodrigo Farias Moreno
You’ve been working on ocean issues for a long time now, do you see any progress?
I’m actually super optimistic, despite the amount of debris we find. Here in Pichilemu, we have been doing cleanups for ten years. Two days ago, I was surfing, and after sunset, I was walking through the beach and it was super clean. I remember when I was a kid, I walked the same way 15 years ago and I just saw plastic bags everywhere. It was super dirty, really out of control. Yesterday, I was like, "Wow, something is changing." Something is changing on a societal level. I think that, for Parley, the beach cleanups have been a great tool for education, and also for supporting local organizations. Because we support a lot of organizations with funding and expertise – and they need that small support to clean up and educate in their parts of the country. So it feels like the movement is really growing.
Speaking of which, you also opened a Parley AIR Station this year.
I'm surprised by how well everything is going with the AIR Station, which we call the “Escuela del Océano” (the Ocean School) in Pichilemu. We opened in March, and from there, it has been like, “Wow.” All our workshops, they get full. We open the submissions and in three hours, they are locked in. We have this environmental brigade, and the kids are taking it seriously. Two or three kids, they’re already thinking seriously to study something related to environment, to marine biology, to science. We have done summer workshop seasons, and autumn workshop seasons – bringing a lot of scientists and educators.
What’s the plan for 2025?
Our idea is to make a new classroom at the AIR Station, because we have so much interest that in the small container that we have, there's no space. We can have 10 kids each class. So now creating, it could be like a 20, 25 square meter classroom. We are going to open more days and be more available for schools or visits of schools. So now, our focus is to install these classrooms and work on new funding for that – and also, to have two more educators on staff.
Operations-wise, we’re going to focus more on rivers and wetlands this year. We’re hiring a new person who is a river expert, and will be installing a riverboom in one location. We plan to do about 70 cleanups in rivers and wetlands, and see how this pilot program goes. Will we find the same collaborations as in the coastal communities? It will be interesting to see. Because wetlands are really important for Chile. There's a national wetland network that protects 40+ important wetlands, but many are polluted by plastic and other waste – so our idea is to clean them all. After that there are a bunch of rivers that we need to really focus on, especially on the education and the contamination of the rivers here. We have thousands of rivers, so we’re going to be very busy in the years to come.
To learn more about Parley Chile, volunteer THERE or support their work, visit parley.tv/CHILE
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