Sagunto recycles 169,280kg of glass in Ecovidrio's Green Flag campaign
Sagunto has wrapped up Ecovidrio's summer Green Flag for Sustainability campaign with 169,280 kilograms of glass collected, almost 40,000 kilograms more than last summer, thanks to 135 hospitality businesses.
Sagunto has wrapped up the summer season of the Green Flag for Sustainability campaign with a figure that clearly improves on last year's tally: 169,280 kilograms of glass deposited in the city's green containers between June and August. It is the seventh time the municipality has taken on this Ecovidrio challenge, in which it took part alongside 27 other municipalities in the Comunitat Valenciana, with 135 local hospitality businesses directly involved in the initiative.
Monthly figures explain that result. July closed with 90,100 kilograms collected — 5% more than the same month in 2025 — despite a strike at the local water utility (Servicio de Aguas de Sagunto, SAG) that complicated collection operations during those weeks. In August, the jump was even bigger: 79,180 kilograms, 78% above the previous year's figure. Combined, the two months put the gap with 2025 at around 40,000 additional kilograms, since last summer as a whole saw 130,100 kilograms collected, against 169,280 this year.
Behind this summer event is the Green Flags Movement, a programme through which Ecovidrio aims to curb the sharp rise in glass waste that the hospitality sector generates every summer, especially in coastal towns with heavy tourist numbers. It is no coincidence that the focus falls on this sector: roughly half of all the glass put into circulation comes precisely from bars and restaurants.
Glass is also one of the best-performing materials, environmentally speaking, among those collected for recycling: it can be melted down and turned into new containers an almost unlimited number of times without losing quality or purity, something that doesn't hold true for other recyclable materials. That property is one of the reasons campaigns like the Green Flags Movement focus so heavily on hospitality businesses: every bottle recovered from a green container, instead of ending up in general waste, re-enters the production chain rather than becoming permanent waste.
In Sagunto, that consumption spikes particularly around the Port area, where the beach and terraces concentrate much of the summer hospitality activity. The fact that the city keeps renewing its commitment to the movement year after year — and has strengthened it so much this year — makes the Port one of the clearest gauges of Sagunto's progress towards a circular economy.
Who is behind this ranking? Ecovidrio is the non-profit organisation that manages the collection and recycling of single-use glass packaging in Spain. It was founded in 1995 and began operating in 1997, under the EU's 1994 packaging directive, and has since coordinated much of the green-container network spread across Spanish municipalities.
Ecovidrio doesn't fund its activity with public money or charge town councils directly for managing green containers: its model runs on what is known as extended producer responsibility, under which the packaging companies and manufacturers that put glass on the market cover the cost of collecting and recycling it afterwards. That is why campaigns like the Green Flag don't add extra expense to Sagunto's municipal budget, beyond the effort of coordinating and promoting the campaign among hospitality businesses.
The outcome of this seventh edition will arrive in the coming weeks, when Ecovidrio announces the two Comunitat Valenciana municipalities that earn the Green Flag. The decision will weigh three factors: growth in tonnes collected compared with the previous year, the share of hospitality businesses that joined in each town, and how much each council promoted the campaign through its own channels.
For a municipality, winning the Green Flag is mainly a symbolic, visibility-boosting achievement: it comes with no financial prize, but it does bring public recognition that many town councils use as an argument for sustainable tourism, and as an incentive for hospitality businesses themselves to keep up the commitment in future editions.
For Sagunto residents, the gesture is simple but cumulative: every item dropped into a green container adds to a tally that, with a 30% rise compared with last summer, places Sagunto among the municipalities that have improved the most in this edition of the Green Flags Movement. According to Ajuntament de Sagunt — Actualidad, with additional data from Wikipedia on Ecovidrio.