Empowering Guatemalan Villagers Plagued by Plastic (insideclimatenews.org)

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. JALAPA, Guatemala—On a hot, muggy afternoon in the small mountain village of El Duraznal, Soila Elizabeth Cruz carefully reached under the slats of a barbed wire fence to retrieve plastic litter stuck in the dirt as trucks whizzed by. The community comes together every three to five months to collect the ubiquitous waste, Cruz said in Spanish as she tossed tattered plastic bottles and packaging into a large garbage bag. “We’re doing this as a community so it looks clean and organized,” said Cruz, who goes by Betty. She learned the benefits of reducing plastic use and waste from Ecolectivos, a project run by U.S. and Guatemalan researchers who study how burning plastic affects the health of women and children in the Santa María Xalapán mountains. The project, co-led by Lisa Thompson of the University of California, San Francisco, and Eri Saikawa of Emory University, ran workshops to help residents of rural Indigenous Xinca villages identify feasible long-term plans to reduce plastic waste and combustion. Cruz and other women in her village, about 20 minutes from the city of Jalapa, participated in months-long workshops where they settled on community cleanups as their...