Corfu - Greece Protecting the environment is the first and most important thing we have to do on Corfu. But we forget the animals, now the tourist gone the problems start on the island.

There are large population of dusty strays on the street. And now the winter starts we see a lot cats and dogslooking for food, they eat what they find in and around the containers, so many will be starved or poisoned.

The dogs start hunting and kill chicken, so the people start hunting the dogs.

Combine this with a common disregard for neutering (people either don’t care or some consider it’s not in keeping with their religious beliefs) and a general culture that often doesn’t pay huge consideration to the moral worth of animals and some horrors unfold.

You hear or read about the same stories over and over – village street poisonings, puppies abandoned by the sides of the road, grown dogs chained to trees 24/7 as guard dogs, others swept into gorvenment-run ‘sanctuaries’ where they are said to not be exercised and never released, others still used as hunting dogs and when the season is over brutally killed.

Clearly there are many many dogs and cats that have loving homes. But many also do not. To stop al this we need your help so we can feed the animals, to close the containers and clean around. If you want to help, please donate. We have two organisation who do a lot work on the island but it is not enough, they can't be all around the island, so we help them here in the north. (It was also a very bad year for kittens with many being dumped in areas where tourists frequent.) We save every year cats, but we can not do it alone.

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Recycling and green energy are very hot issues at the moment in the world. People are also realising how important the environment and its protection are.

For us, Corfu is an island, and this means that it has to dispose of its own waste. This is one of the island’s biggest problems, as there is only one landfill and it’s filling up very quickly!

To start to tell the people what to do and work on it, to get a better world, starting just here, we have to make flyer's. and start to cleaning the places as you can see on the pictures. We need volunteers to help us, but also the equipment to do the jobs, and this costs a lot of money. **************************************************************************************************

Some steps have been made in the direction of recycling. Basically there are blue garbage containers placed around the island where all packaging material (paper, glass, plastic, tins etc) is collected and taken to a sorting facility, separated and recycled. This sounds good in theory, but there are many problems in the collection and separation process and so only a small portion of the packaging material is recycled in the end.

There is though a second recycling process which runs smoothly and this is based totally on individual initiative, with minimal involvement of the state. That’s the recycling of metal (cars, household appliances, batteries, iron, aluminium and more).

There is a recycling plant which uses an informal network of people with cars. Any metal waste placed near a waste container is picked up and brought to the recycling plant of Corfu Recycling, where a fair price is paid for the material, which is then sorted and properly recycled.

Another form of recycling that has been reinforced by the crisis is the recycling of clothes and objects people don’t need anymore by exchanging them, giving them away or selling them at car boot sales. What’s barely done is the recycling of organic materials.

There is no public system for this recycling and what organic recycling is done, is done by people in villages who keep their organic garbage (kitchen leftovers, fruit and vegetable rests and garden waste) to feed their chickens or make compost.

Given the fact that Corfu produces far more waste than it can currently absorb, the need for an integrated recycling system is imperative.

This system should ideally start with separation of garbage at the source (households, restaurants and hotels, factories) in several different containers, a working collection system and recycling plants able to process all kinds of different materials.

The result would be a huge reduction in the amount of waste that goes to the landfill. There are several people and organisations who try to promote such a plant, there is even a proposal to generate biogas from organic waste from olive press and restaurant waste, but no concrete plans have been made public yet.