May Donations: Dominican Republic

Every month, a percentage of our non FSC paper label sales is donated to One Tree Planted – planting trees around the globe. Also, a percentage of our plastic labels sales is donated to The Ocean Cleanup Project.

This month we were able to donate enough money to One Tree Planted to plant 85 trees in the Dominican Republic. Every month, our customers are able to choose which country we contribute to, so a big thank you, as usual, to those of you who voted!

Furthermore, we were able to donate £58 to The Ocean Cleanup project. Our donation will fund the many projects they have around the world, all working towards making our Oceans cleaner.

About the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic hosts the most diverse topography in the Caribbean, including: rainforest, savanna, and highlands encompassing the Caribbean’s tallest mountain Pico Duarte. The Dominican Rupublic has a very rich history, and is known for producing some of the most popular crops in the world, like mangos and coffee.

Funding reforestation here will help smallholder farms with their crop production; therefore encouraging local communities to take part in such projects. The end result should be: increased biodiversity, crop yeild improvement and improvement of community health in general.

How will our donations be used?

Planting trees in deforested areas will encourage the revitalisation of the soil, promote biodiversity, improve water sources and stabilise weather patterns. Focus will also be shared with planting trees on hillsides, as it will prevent erosion, decrease pollution and increase the preservation of crops during storms and unstable weather.

The Project will promote biodiversity by planting a variety of fruit and timber trees. This will nourish the soil and prevent erosion, and will produce 40% more diversity of crops; therefore encouraging better crop yields. Better crop yields with improved sources of clean water will lead to better community nutrition, health and opportunities.

The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup is a non- profit organisation, founded in 2013 by a Dutch inventor named Boyan Slat. They are dedicated to combating the millions of tons of plastic that enter the oceans anually – developing technologies to efficiently stem the flow of plastic waste entering the oceans (typically via rivers). The following list is of some of The Ocean Cleanup’s activities throughout May.

River deployment of Interceptor 019 in Bangkok.

100th plastic extraction performed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Over the course of 3 weeks in Guatemala, 1.1 million Kilos (234 truckloads) of trash have been extracted from rivers.