12 million people, 194,000 hectares of crops and 8% of the national energy demand depends on the Bogotá River, one of the most important and contaminated rivers of South America.

To recover this touristic, economic and cultural potential of the river and reach the goals of the 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development, Banco de Bogotá has been working along local authorities and companies in the construction of a gigantic water plant to remove toxic chemicals from the river.

A huge and expensive effort that will be going to waste if Bogotá residents don’t do their part. Each month, residents throw nearly 270 tons of household trash, broken appliances, old furniture, electronics and many more things that can block the river and re-contaminate what the treatment plant has just cleaned up.

How to invite Bogotá residents to be part of the solution instead of the problem?

Residents of Bogotá throw 270 tons of trash to the river each month. So many objects that you could furnish a whole residential complex with them.

And we did it: furnished a real estate project with all the trash we could find in the river to show Bogotá residents where all their objects go when they are not disposed of in the correct way.

Bogotá residents throw so much garbage to the river that we can furnish a real estate project with it. So, we need to learn how to dispose our garbage to prevent projects like River Apartments keep popping up along the river.

With this key message we invited key opinion leaders of 3 different sectors: economic, cultural, and environmental. We invited them to visit the project, generate content from their knowledge area and spread the message:

- Economic assets: A clean river attracts tourists and improve the agricultural production of crops.

- Cultural assets: Taking care of the river is everyone's job and it´s as easy as managing our garbage at home.

- Environmental assets: We can save endemic species like Eremophilus Mutisii fish.

For 2 months the production team searched in the river and in junkyards that subsists near its waters each one of the objects needed to furnish River Apartments like any other house in Bogotá.

After washing and disinfect the items, we furnished a new building in the middle of the city and uploaded the virtual tour on our website, real estate e-commerce and renting groups.

The apartment opened its doors for 3 months. People could book a guided tour to River Apartments with all biosecurity measures during quarantine and feel the contamination by themselves.

During the tour (and later in the website) people learned about our trash guide, signed a pledge to correctly dispose of their waste at home and joined the environmental recovery activities that Banco de Bogotá carries out.

- The conversation about Bogotá River gets near 51 million impacts on internet, with people sharing their own tips to protect the river (like how to recycle cooking oil, plastics, batteries and more).

- 4 out of 7 Bogotá residents started to talk about their trash.

- The positive messages around Banco the Bogotá increased 32% on social media.

- More than 45.000 Colombians visited the apartment (between virtual and physical tours) and get our trash guide.

- Nearly 16% of our visitors became volunteers at "Banco de Bogotá Forest", a side-project of Banco de Bogotá and Fundación Natura that is currently planting 7,000 trees during 2021.