Tulum's business council joins the beach cleanups, and the plastic gets a second destination

Environmental groups and Tulum's business sector have brought their beach cleanups under a single community-run alliance, aimed at sargassum and at the waste that collects beside it before high season.

The announcement came from Patricia de la Torre Ortiz, activist and founding president of the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial de Tulum, the business coordinating council formally constituted in the municipality in early September. She named Fundación Tuseres, Guardianes de la Naturaleza, and Parley as the organizations already working together on the collection and separation of recyclable materials, and environmental education.

The timing carries the story. Zofemat Tulum has pulled more than 5,600 tons of sargassum off the municipality's shoreline so far this year, a figure its director, David Buchanan García, said this month already exceeds everything cleared during all of 2025. Heavy machinery handles the algae. The plastic, glass and metal that come off the same sand move through a far thinner chain, and that is where the alliance says it fits.

A business council signs on to the Tulum beach cleanup

De la Torre framed the work as shared rather than municipal. Environmental pressure on Tulum falls on society, the private sector and the authorities at the same time, she said, and that argument is what the council brings to an activity which until now has depended on volunteers and corporate sponsors.

The council is weeks old. Its founding board, presided over by De la Torre, was presented in early September as a nonpartisan body meant to give the municipality's productive sector a single voice. Members of the same group appeared in August at the launch of the Somos Tulum discount card, an attempt to boost local spending during a weak season.

Her own record predates the council. De la Torre founded Fundación Tuseres in Tulum in April 2022 around beach cleanups, recycling workshops and art made from collected waste, and the foundation has since run mass cleanup days with corporate sponsorship, including one in January 2025 that moved 204 volunteers and recovered more than 350 kilograms of separated material. She said the current alliance continues more than 17 years of community activism in the region.

The trash goes one way, the sargassum another

Clearing the macroalgae is a heavy-equipment operation. Zofemat brigades work with Navy personnel and hotel crews, and the algae is dried on geomembrane so the sand it carries can be recovered before final disposal. The municipality reported 17 sargassum containers in service in April, 10 of which were spread throughout the hotel zone and served more than 25 hotels.

The alliance is aimed at the other half of what comes off the sand. De la Torre described a second track running beside the algae removal, in which the waste collected on the same stretch of coast is sorted and sent on to be turned into usable material, supported by environmental education and by what she called sustainable technologies.

The central message is to keep the areas clean and separate the waste. It is a great mission that the allied organizations in Tulum have taken on, to carry out actions with environmental impact and promote regenerative tourism.

She put the model's logic on a shorter line. One person's trash is another's treasure, she said, once the discarded material is folded back into the value chain.

What Petgas says its machines actually produce

The most concrete aspect of that second track is the alliance with Petgas, which De la Torre described as processing PET plastic to produce biodiesel and gasoline.

The company describes its process in different terms. Petgas uses non-catalytic pyrolysis, heating plastic in the absence of oxygen until it breaks down, and lists its outputs as gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and gas. Carlos Parraguirre Díaz, its technology director, told the Associated Press last year that the machine at the company's plant in Boca del Río, Veracruz, processes about 1.5 tons of plastic a week and yields roughly 1,350 liters of fuel. None of those products is biodiesel, which is made from vegetable oils and animal fats rather than from plastic.

Petgas is not a newcomer here. It was among the sponsors when Fundación Tuseres launched in 2022 and among the partners at the Xcacel sanctuary cleanup in 2025. What the announcement did not include was how much plastic the alliance expects to hand over, or who would cover the cost of getting it to a plant.

5,600 tons of sargassum, and a season that is finally easing

The alliance arrives at the tail of the heaviest sargassum year on Tulum's record. By mid-July, the municipality counted more than 2,800 tons removed by Zofemat personnel alone, nearly double the same period in 2025. Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo described an extreme arrival that month and a permanent operation coordinated with the Navy, the state government and hoteliers.

The curve has since turned. Buchanan said the beaches are recovering their natural color as the volume drops, and state authorities quoted in the local press put collection across Quintana Roo at close to 110,000 tons this year, compared with 94,000 for all of 2025. Specialists cited by regional outlets expect the arrival season to close between September and October.

That leaves a window, and the alliance has been explicit about wanting to use it. Its stated objectives are to speed up cleanup days, improve the town's urban image, and promote what De la Torre calls regenerative tourism before visitors return in volume.

Nobody has published a cleanup calendar

What exists so far is a statement of intent with the operating detail still absent. There are no dates for the cleanup days, no target for how much material the alliance expects to divert from the dump, and no named source of funding for transport and processing. The specific contributions of Guardianes de la Naturaleza and Parley were not described beyond their inclusion in the group.

Whether the municipal government is part of the arrangement is also unclear. De la Torre placed the authorities inside her shared-responsibility formula, but what was announced is an alliance of civil organizations and business, not an agreement signed with the Ayuntamiento.

The first cleanup day under the alliance has no announced date. The sargassum season is expected to close within weeks, and high season opens in December, which gives the group under three months to show what the second destination for Tulum's beach waste looks like in practice.

Would you separate your plastic at a Tulum beach cleanup if you knew it was going to a fuel plant instead of the dump? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.