By IANS
Mexico City : The city of Toluca in central Mexico is seeking a place in the Guinness Book of Records by putting up a clothesline 40 km long with room to hang some 70,000 articles of clothing, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
Jaime Lopez, head of Young Toluca, a municipality organisation dedicated to developing programmes for young people, said the project managed to collect 35 tonnes of clothes in a month.
The previous record was set in 2005 by students of the Monterrey Institute of Technology, which strung a 37-km clothesline in the state of Morelos, also in central Mexico.
The idea this time is to donate the articles of clothing used in the record-breaking attempt “to some of the 15,000 neediest people in the municipality” who suffer from the biting winter cold, Lopez said.
They will also deliver a considerable amount of clothes, above all items that are useful in a warm climate, to those left homeless by the recent floods in the southern states of Tabasco and Chiapas.
Stringing the immense clothesline started Sunday in Alameda Park 2000 on the south side of Toluca, said Lopez, who hopes the work will be finished by next Friday.
To collect the clothes, Young Toluca called for the public cooperation on the radio and publicized the event with the help of schools, companies and citizen-participation committees.
The structure consists of 34 clotheslines, each approximately 75 meters (246 feet) long and with eight levels.
Each level has a double clothesline, making a total of 40.1 km.
Every day some 50 people come to put up the clotheslines, most of them volunteers from academic institutions and Toluca City Hall.
The Guinness organization requires that the record be verified by a notary and three independent witnesses, and that it receive 20 photographs of the event and an unedited video travelling all 40 kilometers of the clothesline.
It also requires that the distance between articles of clothing be no greater than 6 cm, that the clothesline have the traditional clothespins for hanging out the clothes and that the clothesline be continuous.