Students should head down to the bay to see the latest addition: Fill A Bag station! It is a stand where buckets are set up so you can take a bucket, go down to the bay and fill it up with trash. By doing this, you are doing your part in keeping the campus and environment clean. Fill A Bag is also a great opportunity to earn service hours.

Once you are finished filling your bucket, you can go ahead and scan the QR code on the stand, send a picture of your filled bucket, and receive up to two service hours. Volunteers for Fill A Bag set a great example helping clean the campus. As a group they filled a great number of buckets and trash bags as a shocking amount of trash was found right here at ILS bay.

Students were helping clean around the bay on land and even on the kayaks, pulling trash from the mangroves.

Manny Rionda is the founder of Fill A Bag, a beach cleaning initiative that helps coastal community’s raise awareness around the impact of marine debris and single use plastic pollution.

“Fill A bag is an initiative in which we place wooden posts that hold reusable bags and buckets and place them around beaches to invite people to turn an ordinary walk into a meaningful cleanup anytime they go to the beach,”  explained Mr. Rionda.

“Our goal here today is to activate a Fill A bag station right here at the ILS campus and invite volunteers to come and have a gateway eco activity experience to allow them to see the impact of pollution,”  Mr. Riando added.

Mr. Rionda explained the origin of Fill A Bag.

“Fill a bag was put into motion five years ago, it started with just bringing a bag to the beach, filling it and sharing posts to bring awareness and the idea of Fill A Bag was submitted to the Miami Foundation’s Public Space Challenge in 2018, a competition to improve a public space, and Fill A Bag won. So far, Fill A Bag has 45 stations all across the country,” he said.

Students, you are encouraged to pick up a bucket and fill it to help your campus and the environment. The problem of pollution lies at the foot of the ILS campus, and you have a chance to do something about it. It’s time  to pitch in!