We have encountered that, whilst a large part of Mar del Plata’s population cares for environmental sustainability, and our city has a lot of sustainable entrepreneurships and organizations, most of them are unknown to a large part of the citizens. We think this is a problem that doesn’t help the development of our city’s circular economy. This issue can be resolved if we bring together all the entrepreneurships into a platform that makes it easier for people to find them. By doing this, we are targeting everyone, regardless of their age, gender or social group, that has an interest in collaborating with the sustainable development of our city. The only requirement is to have access to Google Maps, via a computer, mobile phone or any device with internet connection.

The main objective of project EcoMapeo is creating an interactive map that includes all the available entrepreneurships, organizations or collection points in the city that are related to sustainability. From recycling/upcycling entrepreneurships for plastics, metals, used clothes to vegan or pet friendly gastronomic producers, all of them will be shown on a Google Maps map that groups them into categories regarding their type of activity. The access to this interactive map will be spreaded via our hub’s social media accounts, allies, partners and other platforms such as news portals. For creating this map, we are designing a form with questions based on existing and established sustainability certifications, that allow us to identify the entrepreneurships and organizations that are truly related to sustainability. Therefore, once the form is complete, the tasks will be its spreading, so we can collect all the possible information about entrepreneurships and organizations, the creation of the map and, lastly, its sharing to all of Mar del Plata’s community. For doing so, we have divided our group into three sub-groups to ease and speed up the workload, the form-making and the map-making groups, as well as the one in charge of the social accounts.

Regarding the goals of the project, in the short term we aim to increase the citizen engagement in acquiring sustainable habits, such as consuming or collaborating with the recycling of materials. Then, for the long term, one of the goals is to add participation bonuses for users, as well as for registered entrepreneurships and organizations. Besides, one of the most valuable aspects of our project is that it can be scalable or replicated in any city, as it doesn’t only apply to the characteristics of Mar del Plata. So sharing it with other Global Shapers hubs from Argentina and all over the world is another important long term goal of our project.

As sponsors, we aim to work alongside the government of Mar del Plata in the future, so our project can become a tool or resource for the city.

More information: https://www.instagram.com/globalshapersmdp?igsh=MXV4eDhmN2VnbnlhZw==