Tourism is one of the essential characteristics of Constanța - especially in the summer months, the city with its opening to the Black Sea temporarily hosts thousands of tourists from both the country and abroad. When we came up with the idea of analyzing the impact of tourism on the local environment and identifying ways to promote sustainable tourism practices, we knew we wanted to investigate the correlation between the thousands of travelers who come to our town and the pollution we have to deal with, which is getting worse every year.
Arrivals registered in tourist reception structures in August 2022 totaled 453.6 thousand people, 7.9% less than in August 2021. Constanța county recorded the most tourist arrivals compared to the other counties, in August 2022, 3.3 times more than in Bucharest municipality and 3.2 times more than in Brașov county. Of the total number of arrivals, in August 2022, the arrivals of Romanian tourists in tourist reception structures with accommodation functions represented 98.8%, and the arrivals of foreign tourists 1.2%. At the level of foreign tourists' country of residence, the first 2 countries from which foreign tourists arrived in Constanța county, in August 2022, were Germany and the United States of America, according to the Constanța county statistics department.
Thus, at least in the summer months, tourism represents the economic pillar of the municipality, additional income coming both from the services offered by accommodation units and from other commercial units located in resorts or other places frequented by tourists.
In exchange for the advantages offered by the large number of tourists, they leave behind numerous imbalances in the marine ecosystem, but also
waste that harms the lives of the residents and not only that. Thus, multiple projects aimed at the greening and cleaning of public places are being carried
out in Constanța, organized both by the County Council (the activities carried out and the statistics collected are presented in the PJGD Constanța County
Waste Management Plan) as well as by NGOs and other associations.
- The first step we took towards reaching our goal was searching the internet for statistics related to our topic as you saw earlier. The results we found weren’t in the Earth’s favor.
- The second thing we decided to do was create an online platform that people from our town could access, where we started posting blog posts to raise awareness about the damage of tourism, and encourage our readers to be what we like to call “eco tourists”. We were happy to find out that, even though we don’t have a large audience yet, our few readers gave us great feedback and encouraged us to keep working towards our goal. This is our website: https://bit.ly/43tTVQu .
- Realizing that we can’t bring people to our site unless we promote it somehow, we started an Instagram account dedicated to our cause. Each of us posted the accounts on our personal Insta stories, so that our friends and followers were able to access it and check out our work and the things about which we want to raise consciousness. This is our Instagram account: https://instagram.com/eco.constanta?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA
- The last and most important step we took so far was going to the beach and picking up the trash we found there. Even though it makes a really small difference when compared to the Global issue with pollution, every single thing that we are able to do in our day to day lives matters. Besides that, all of us believe in the power of example, and we hope that by setting one and sharing it on our online platforms we can encourage more people to follow us on this ride where we fight for a better future.
Our journey is far from being over, and, if anything, this project pushed us in the direction of working together to make a change, even if it is a small one, to the environment we live in.
