Holy Week vacationers produced an unholy mess along the normally clean and peaceful white sand of popular Cebu beach destination Sante Fe over the past several days, leaving others to spend their Easter cleaning up hundreds of liquor bottles and other trash.
The images of the trash were captured by photographer Kristine Joyce Campaña of Cebu-based newspaper The Freeman.
While there are many resorts in the beach town, hundreds of vacationers brought tents and opted to camp out on the beachfront.
The Isla Music festival was taking place near the beach, only adding to the amount of trash left for locals to clean up.
According to a report by The Freeman, it took a total of 8 hours to collect all the trash.
That same report said that on Easter Sunday morning, more than 20 people from the festival organizer’s team cleaned up the garbage from within the festival grounds.
A story in Cebu Daily News said 60 employees of the local government, plus 10 other local residents as well as law enforcement helped join the clean-up.
According to research published in journal Science, Philippines ranks a whopping 3rd globally in contributing to plastic pollution in the ocean.
Vince Cinches of Greenpeace told Cebu Daily News, “It shows that some Cebuanos and Filipinos have an entitlement to think that cleanliness is some other people’s business.”
No trash bins? Not an excuse, Cinches said. “It is also the obligation of the partygoers to keep their trash if there are no bins around and should at least clean after themselves.”
See photos of the trash and clean-up below:
Photos used with permission from The Freeman
