John Benus is an foreigner who is in love with Mexico.
Before he moved here, though, he was an Adopt A Highway team leader for over 20 years, cleaning up the streets of Marin County, California. He’s now lived many, many years in Mexico, and successfully created a guerra contra la basura, or war against litter. The project started in Talpa de Allende, but the Puerto Vallarta Tourism Office has asked for him to continue his work here in PV.
The overall goal for this project is to make the streets, rivers, and oceans of PV clean and litter-free. But, that has to be broken down.
Firstly, John needs to get 150,000 signatures on the Declaration of Agreement, from people all different ages and all over Vallarta. There will be groups of people who pick up trash and hand out fliers for The War Against Litter, a leader with 10-15 volunteers for each colonial, depending on the size of it. There is also a separate form that volunteers can fill out to help.
Once John has the groups and volunteers they pick up trash from rivers, beaches, and streets. They try to make it look as nice as possible to show other locals what a clean neighborhood looks like, and how nice it is, basically they are trying to inspire others.
Next they want to try to get permanent containers at important corners and places in neighborhoods, beaches, and even along rivers. These permanent containers will no be able to move or be stolen, like other containers such as trash cans. Hopefully, with the containers all around, people will throw trash in the containers rather than contaminate and throw it on the ground.
Lastly John wants to be able to educate people who don’t know. He wants to try to create an educational program throughout the year for both public and private schools, teaching about how horrible contamination is and the importance of keeping your neighborhood clean and litter-free. For smaller kids there is going to be animated videos with fish, turtles, birds, or other animals talking about it, from their perspective.
As of July 1,2021 our 225 Volunteers from 12 to 65 years old have collected over 600 bags of trash, equal to about 2 tons, that would have gone into Bahia de Banderas. 80 % was plastic bottles/containers and 20 % was fast food wrappers, glass, bottles, diapers, tires, etc.
John has been putting his whole life into this program, because having a clean environment is his life, but he needs some help. If you can’t be a volunteer, then you can always donate. The man has been self-employed for 45 years, and currently his only income is $660 per month from Social Security. And everything he is doing costs him money as well as time, so please, donate to his GoFundMe or volunteer to do some work. And the donation doesn’t have to be large, or you don’t have to work a large amount of volunteer time, because any help is better than none.
John Benus' Mexican Phone Number: 388 105 0786
John Benus' American Phone Number: 415 331 0100