Not just a beach-clean…
Tens of thousands of people combined forces to clean-up a nation recently.
Estonian people scoured fields, streets, forests and riverbanks on Saturday to amass tonnes of rubbish in the Baltic state’s first national clean-up.
Locating illegal dumps and assorted junk by internet mapping and GPS systems, they aimed to collect up to 10,000 tonnes of rubbish.
Every kind of junk from tractor batteries to plastic bottles and paint tins was located and ferried to central dumps, often in people’s own vehicles.
new mind-sets
“It is not really about the rubbish. It is about changing people’s mind sets. Next year it might be something else,” said Tiina Urm, spokeswoman for the Let’s Do It! event.
Estonia inherited a mass of rubbish after it regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 but it has only added to the problem since. Recycling is also slowly becoming more and more popular, as the government also initiated a recycling program nationwide.
“It has to be done, it can’t stay here,” said Mats Eek, 17, cleaning up a site in the middle of a forest near the central town of Turi, 100 km (62 miles) from capital city Tallinn.
He and his team removed old metal, plastic, glass, bottles, farm medical remains and household garbage dumped hundred of meters from deep in a forest.
Estonia’s annual inflation rate reached a 10-year high of 11.4 percent in April, driven by rising costs for food and housing, the government said Thursday. Rising inflation, coupled with slower growth, is increasingly clouding economic prospects for the small nation, once known as one of the “Baltic Tigers” along with Latvia and Lithuania.
Loading ...