- A heart-shaped container outside the Development Corporation will serve as a collection point
Fundación Cepsa and Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council through its Development Corporation unveiled the El corazón de Tenerife, solidario [Heart of Charitable Tenerife] sculpture today installed in Víctimas del Terrorismo Square in Tenerife’s capital. It will be used to collect plastic bottle tops for charity.
Details of this campaign were presented during the ceremony, which was attended by economic development councillor, Alfonso Cabello; Fundación Cepsa’s manager in the Canary Islands, Belén Machado; and education and young people councillor, Verónica Meseguer. It will run for at least a year. School children from Villa Ascensión School were first to deposit their plastic bottle tops.
The sculpture is located in one of the main streets in Tenerife’s capital and is made of weathering steel and steel mesh. It can hold up to 200 kilos of bottle tops. The sculpture’s heart shape also echoes the slogan of the capital city: ‘Santa Cruz, the heart of Tenerife’.
For Belén Machado, the sculpture “combines charity, recycling and art; all areas that Fundación Cepsa is heavily involved with”, adding that: “What we want to achieve now is to inform people in the capital and encourage them to bring their bottle tops to this first official collection point to raise money for charity.”
“The foundation has been collecting tops for years from our staff in Tenerife and Gran Canaria, helping to fund, among other causes, an operation for a girl with a cleft lip and growth hormone therapy for another. We are also collaborating to buy an electric elevator for the home of one young person from Tenerife.
Cabello said that: “This structure, which is the first of its size in the city, is based on the model from the ‘Conciencia-T’ charity project launched by the blacksmith from Icod de los Vinos, Moisés Afonso, which has already been installed in several town across the Canary Islands, especially in Tenerife.”
The councillor explained that: “Moisés’ daughter, Nerea, who has a severe intolerance to cow’s milk protein, wanted to help other kids, as her classmates and friends had done for her. So, a couple of years ago she drew a heart and asked her father to make one out of metal to collect bottle tops and help people facing economic hardship to buy things they needed such as wheelchairs, crutches or expensive medicine. And from there, the initiative was born.”