The importance of being proactive. What have we done?

As most of you know (and if you don't, you need to follow us on Instagram @itslogicnow) every Friday we put our laptops aside, grab our gloves and sacks and head out into the woods next to the office to pick up the trash there. It may seem unbelievable, but not even in a whole year of going out every Friday would we manage to clean up the amount of garbage that there’s in that forest.

This is an area located between two towns in Madrid: Boadilla del Monte and Alcorcon. The entrance to the forest belongs to Boadilla del Monte, but the rest of it belongs to Alcorcon. We believe that because it is an area shared by two municipalities and because of its remoteness from the second of them (it belongs to Alcorcon, but is closer to Boadilla del Monte) neither of the two has much in mind and therefore is neglected. Even so, there are many people who walk and go out to do sports here because it is very nice and pleasant, despite the garbage.

Here in Spain, companies have to manage their waste, either themselves or through an external waste management company (which is usually not economical). Moreover, they are not allowed to take the garbage to the clean point of their town, so we thing it’s more convenient for them to load the truck and empty it in the forest. This saves them the cost of disposing of this waste in a legal and ethical way.

What we did to try to stop this was to tag both town halls on social media every time we went to clean this forest to let them know what was going on. We wanted them to take action on the matter but they never answer or they gave us the runaround. Even so, we did not stop insisting and, finally, we decided to put a claim directly to the city council of Boadilla del Monte (where our office is).

If we could not make them pick up all the garbage themselves, at least we could try to prevent the companies from continuing to dump their waste there.

A short time later, the people in charge of this issues in Boadilla del Monte placed a levy fence, as well as two huge concrete blocks that acted as a barrier so that no more trucks could pass.

With all this story we want to tell you that being proactive in this kind of things is good for the environment. It’s important that the authorities know about all of that and that they know that people care about it. It’s the only way that they are going to start acting.

Sometimes the authorities don't know about this kind of problem or they don't want to see it unless we put a little pressure on them. It didn't take long for them to put this remedy to a problem that has been there for years.

Together we can make the world a better place!