The border collie, who takes common walks in Santiago‘s metropolitan park together with his proprietor, has develop into well-known carrying a inexperienced cape in a comic book used as an academic information.
It began when Sam and Gonzalo Chiang needed to cease many times within the metropolis’s largest inexperienced space to choose up plastic bottles, masks, cans and meals packages.
“On Sam’s walks we started to search out loads of rubbish,” Chiang mentioned in an interview. “From that, the necessity to come ready to remove the rubbish that we discovered on every go to arose.”
In April alone, Sam and Gonzalo collected 602 masks, 585 bottles and 304 cans along with clothes, helmets and meals wrappers, based on an official depend.
“The stroll is an effective alternative to wash, slightly than litter,” Chiang mentioned.
Park officers have been impressed by Sam, who visits the vacationer attraction at the very least thrice every week, and determined to make use of his picture in its park care marketing campaign.
Catalina Aravena turned the 5-1/2 year-old collie right into a cartoon in “Sam: The Parquemet Superhero,” telling guests to take their waste with them or use one of many greater than 40 recycling factors all through the park.
“This grew to become way more widespread than anticipated,” Aravena mentioned. “It reached completely different colleges and it has been unfold very nicely on social media.”
The park – residence to a zoo, a number of mountain climbing trails and a funicular railway – launched anti-litter campaigns final yr urging drink distributors to change from plastic to glass cups, and began classifying rubbish into separate bins.
Sam and Gonzalo “have impressed us to speed up this training course of and construction this rubbish classification,” mentioned Eduardo Villalobos, the park’s performing director.