This year, Benidorm residents have once again united behind the SEUR Foundation’s “Caps for a New Life” campaign, which Benidorm City Council supports to encourage the recycling of caps for a good cause: to give impoverished children access to medical care that is not paid for by the healthcare system or supplies that help them deal with physical issues they face that they are unable to get through other channels. The results of the 2024 campaign, in which the Foundation gathered almost 1.5 million caps placed by Benidorm citizens in the heart-shaped containers placed across the city, were revealed yesterday, Thursday 13th March, by Mónica Gómez, the Councillor for the Environment.

Gómez pointed out that “the proceeds from recycling these bottle caps go to helping children with medical needs, so we’re not only helping to reduce our environmental impact, but also to improve the quality of life for many children and their families.” The SEUR Foundation is in charge of gathering and transporting these bottle caps to a recycling business that sells compost per tonne at market value, he added.

According to the councillor, the total quantity gathered in Benidorm in the six heart-shaped containers that the City Council placed at various points across the city was 1,575,000 caps, weighing 3.15 tonnes, which equated to a 630 euro financial contribution.

She said that by recycling these caps, 4.73 tonnes of CO2, the primary gas responsible for climate change, have not been released into the atmosphere. That is the equivalent of 42,114 kilometres of travel, or little more than one full orbit of the Earth. In keeping with these equivalencies, the Environment Minister noted that, if arranged in a row, all of the caps would cover 47 kilometres, and that proper waste management would be equal to the CO2 absorbed by a forest of 788 trees in a year or that released by an apartment with the heating on continuously for nearly 19 years. This would further illustrate the impact of this initiative in Benidorm.

Els Tolls (Belgica Avenue), Rincón de Loix (Juan Fuster Zaragoza Street), La Cala (Secretary Juan Baldoví Street), Colonia Madrid (Llorca Linares Social Centre), and two in the central area—one on Maravall Street with Plaza Neptuno and another on Avenida de l’Aigüera, very close to the Town Hall—are the six containers that Gómez stated were installed in Benidorm to facilitate the collection of caps in all neighbourhoods.

He added that since the start of the “Caps for a New Life” project in 2011, more than €1.3 million has been raised to help approximately 200 youngsters from all around Spain with their orthopaedic or medical treatments. Leo, a young Benidorm resident, was one of them. A few years ago, he was given €3,200 to pay for his aquatic therapy sessions as a treatment for Hirschsprung’s disease, a disorder associated with Down syndrome.

This is why Mónica Gómez expressed her appreciation for “the involvement of the citizens of Benidorm, who from the very beginning have supported this initiative that seeks to improve the quality of life of children” and that “in addition to this charitable purpose, also has an impact on the environment by promoting plastic recycling, thereby reducing CO2 emissions.”