Mark Reynolds from Suntera Global speaks to Julie Blackburn after the company won the Environmental Initiative of the Year award at the 2023 Media Isle of Man Awards for Excellence.
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00:00 with Mark Reynolds from Sunterra who have won the environmental initiative of the year and you've
00:05 won it with a wonderfully imaginative scheme where you put a load of fish-shaped sculptures which
00:12 were in a sense big baskets weren't they, collecting waste all around. Do you want to tell me a bit about it?
00:17 Yeah I mean really we're just one part, it was an initiative in collaboration with Beach Buddies,
00:23 Isle of Man and Bill Dale along with Andrea Chalmers and the team from Isle of Liston to try and bring
00:28 together not just the environmental side but also the healthy body healthy mind side of things and
00:33 getting people in the community outside doing it so it came from an idea walking on a beach in
00:39 the Mediterranean actually where we saw a structure like this and decided it'd be a really good idea
00:44 on our own location to do. And you've given them some really cool names some of them. We do yeah
00:49 the Rockfish, Cleo the Rockfish, Billy the Mackerel and Sam with the Seal I think down in Kastan as well
00:56 it's been fantastic I think and we've collected around 30,000 bottles now across the island which
01:02 is an amazing achievement. Well that's all plastic that isn't going to go into the sea isn't it?
01:07 100% 100% and you know we're an island and a UNESCO biosphere island so. Yeah and as well as helping to
01:15 clean up the beaches what do you think have been like the wider benefits of the initiative in terms
01:21 of community engagement? I think when we set out to do it it was trying to look at all ages
01:28 throughout so we actually went through and worked with our Liston to get entry into primary schools
01:34 engage the students to actually create all the designs and concepts themselves and then obviously
01:38 working with artists such as Steph and Darren Jackson to help create the structures all locally
01:44 produced and it was about just trying to create a legacy really for the island of Man and trying to
01:49 take what we could make just recycling initiative that could benefit everybody. Well that's wonderful
01:56 congratulations. Thank you very much really appreciate it.
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