Recycling of life jackets

| Subject: International Cooperation

Trip to Lesbos to follow up on this cooperation project

Some members of AMB, accompanied by the 3 winners of the social ideas contest, have moved to the Greek island of Lesbos for the project monitoring on the life jacket recycling project and to incorporate new designs into the productive project.

Analysis of refuge context in Lesbos

First of all, they visited the Moria refugee camp, an official camp managed by the UNHCR, which has a capacity of 2,500 people but currently hosts 9,000. They also had the opportunity to visit the Pipka Camp, which is managed by the local partner of AMB, Lesvos Solidarity, where about 100 refugees with high vulnerability are living.

The AMB Cooperation team and the awarded students have visited Mosaik center managed by Lesvos Solidarity: a care center for refugees where several activities, language courses, legal advice, creative activities, workshops and cultural events are carried out.

Also, they have visited one of the municipalities that has received more refugees because of its proximity to the Turkish coast: Skala Sykaminia. The AMB Cooperation team has met with the mayor of the municipality and the neighborhood organization of the community.

The life jackets recycling project

After seeing the experience of these camps and visiting one of the territories where refugees arrive, they visited the life jacket cemetery of Molyvos, in the north of the island, with an important symbolic value: it is the end of the life vests that have saved thousands of lives and at the same time the origin of an environmental sustainability problem.

The entire recycling process is carried out with Lesvos Solidarity. Vests are picked up at this point, transported to the Pipka Kamp where the different materials are cleaned and classified.

Once all the materials are clean and organized, they are moved to the Mosaik Center, where they are processed at the tailoring workshop and sold in a small shop.

An important element of these projects is the fact that local citizens and refugees are part of all the steps of recycling life vests: collection, cleaning and preparation of various objects. One of the objectives is increasing social cohesion between the local community and refugees.

The 3 winners of the Social Ideas Contest, students of the Massana school, presented their designs (the key-chain and the mat), to the local entity Lesvos Solidarity and have worked their productive cycle with the members of the project to be able to add them to their productive catalog.

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Lesbos