I truly appreciated the overview of the challenges facing our oceans that appeared this morning on the Today show.  The amount of plastic in the ocean is staggering.    Sea turtles inject plastic and often become impacted.  For the lucky ones that manage to wash ashore and are rescued and rehabilitated they may stand a chance for survival.  But, we have created a solution that helps to decrease the amount of plastic that ends up in the ocean and injuring sea turtles and other wildlife.  We turned that plastic trash into treasure!  We work with local impoverished communities that have no stable source of income.  While these communities are sympathetic to wildlife, their first priority is caring for their family.  We have created a cottage industry that involves teaching communities to crochet these amazing mochilas (tote bags) not out of cotton, or hemp but out of plastic bags!  Before these plastic bags end up in the trash, or litter our oceans, local communities in Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua are collecting plastic bags  and then crochetting them into eco-mochilas.  Local community artisans work to produce these eco-mochilas for sale to local and international markets and become advocates in their community to protect local biodiversity.  It has been a successful model that we have used to protect the highly endangered cotton-top tamarin, a 1 pound monkey that is found only in Colombia (www.proyectotiti.com) and has now been transferred to the sea turtle conservation efforts through our collaboration with WIDECAST.   It is a simple way to clean up our environment while empowering local communities to engage in conservation efforts to protect biodiversity.

If you would like to learn more about our successful conservation program to protect tamarins and turtles, please feel free to contact me.

Regards,
Anne Savage, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Proyecto Titi

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