It takes a community: how Mingas por el Mar is rewriting the story of Ecuador's coast
There's a word in Ecuador that doesn't translate cleanly into English. Minka or Minga - from the Quechua minccacuni describes an ancient practice of voluntary collective labour, where a community comes together to complete a task that benefits everyone. Building a school, clearing an irrigation canal, raising a house. Nobody is paid. The work runs on reciprocity and a shared understanding that any one person's difficulty is really everyone's.
So when a group of volunteers along Ecuador's coast chose to call their beach clean-ups mingas, they were trying to say something very specific. This isn't a chore to be outsourced or a problem for someone else to fix. It's collective work, for the collective good - and everyone has a part to play.
Why the coast needs a minga
The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate until you see the numbers. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, close to 8 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic waste is generated every year. Ecuador produces roughly 5.3 million tonnes of solid waste annually, and nearly half - around 47% - still ends up in open dumps, most of them concentrated in the coastal regions. Of the plastic Ecuador generates, only about 16% is formally recovered and recycled.
Volunteer-led surveys of Ecuadorian beaches have consistently found plastics to be the single most common type of litter - making up more than 60% of all debris across 26 beaches in one nationwide study, and as much as 91% in a separate survey of beaches in Guayas province.
Here's the detail that matters most, though: on Ecuador's continental beaches, most of the litter comes from local sources. Not all of it, of course - near the Gulf of Guayaquil, currents and the Guayas River carry debris in from elsewhere too - but the bulk of it these beaches originates close to home, a pattern found right along the East Pacific coast.
This isn't only pollution washing in from distant oceans and foreign shores. Much of it is local - which means it's also within the local community’s power to change. That single finding is part of what makes Mingas por el Mar’s work so powerful. A beach clean-up isn't just tidying up after the tide. It's a community confronting the consequences of its own consumption.
From a handful of cleanups to a national network
Mingas por el Mar grew, as these things often do, out of ordinary attentiveness. In early 2014, Isabel Romero and Michael Warwick noticed how much waste was accumulating on Ecuador's beaches - and how little was being done about it. Two years later, in January 2016, Cecilia Torres and Ricardo Plaza turned that concern into momentum, driving a full month of beach clean-ups along the coast to get citizens talking and taking action.
But the real story isn't the founders. It's what gathered around them. What began as a few clean-up days has become a foundation of roughly 300 volunteers, organised into 25 groups spanning every region of Ecuador - the Coast, the Sierra highlands, the Amazon, and the Galápagos.
Among the leaders and volunteers are biologists, lawyers, tourism professionals, environmental engineers, educators and artists, each bringing their own skills to a different part of the work. It's a living reminder that caring for the ocean was never a job for one kind of expert. It takes all of us - which is, of course, exactly what a minga is.
More than just picking up rubbish
The philosophy that runs through everything is this: a minga is not only a day for collecting waste. It's a space for understanding where that waste came from, questioning the consumption habits that produce it, and generating real change in communities. Pick up a bottle, and you've cleaned one metre of sand. Ask why the bottle was there - and who keeps buying them, and what could replace them - and you've started something bigger.
That thinking has carried the foundation well beyond the shoreline, into several connected initiatives:
Mingas and waste monitoring: Clean-up days double as data collection, characterising the waste found on beaches and marine-coastal ecosystems. This rigorous, volunteer-led beach monitoring is exactly how researchers have built the evidence base on Ecuador's plastic problem, and citizen-gathered data has proven reliable enough to support long-term scientific study. Every sorted, counted bag is a small contribution to understanding the problem at scale.
Environmental education: Workshops and activities with children, young people, communities and institutions, building marine conservation, responsible consumption and waste reduction into how people think - because behaviour change, not cleaning, is what ultimately turns the tide.
Recycling and circular economy: Community-led recycling, reuse and repurposing projects, including work developed in Ballenita.
Natural Areas Free of Disposable Plastics: An initiative helping tourism and hospitality venues replace single-use products with reusable systems - proof that zero-waste, sustainable tourism isn't a fantasy but a working model. It's a meaningful intervention in a country where tourism has repeatedly been identified as a leading source of beach litter.
Advocacy and citizen participation: Mingas has had a seat at the policy table too, contributing to Ecuador's Organic Law for the Rationalisation, Reuse and Reduction of Single-Use Plastics and the Organic Law on Marine-Coastal Space Governance - known as the "Waves Law." That kind of grassroots pressure feeds directly into national ambition: Ecuador's official Roadmap for Action on Plastics aims to cut plastic pollution by 60% from 2022 levels by 2040.
Conservation and protection of ecosystems: Partnerships and on-the-ground action to strengthen protection for Ecuador's beaches, oceans and marine-coastal ecosystems.
Building a community
For Karla Espinel, who leads the Salinas group, the meaning of the work is clear:
"Being a volunteer with Mingas por el Mar has taught me that a minga is much more than picking up waste: it's an opportunity to educate, connect with our community, and transform our love for the ocean into concrete actions to care for it.
One of the most incredible things about this journey has been meeting so many wonderful people who, from different places and with their own skills, are also working for the ocean. Sharing and learning from them inspires me to keep going.
Today, my greatest motivation is connecting people with the ocean so that they come to know it, value it, and choose to protect it."
That instinct - connect people to the ocean, and they'll choose to protect it - is exactly why Mingas por el Mar is part of the OCEAN FOR ALL Alliance. Different coastline, but the same conviction: that the ocean belongs to all of us, and so does the work of caring for it.
The old mingas ended with a shared meal, a celebration of what a community could do together that no one could do alone. Mingas por el Mar has kept the spirit and pointed it at the sea. The invitation is the same one it's always been. Come and lend a hand. There's a place for you in this.
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