About 15 tonnes of scrap metal to be removed from Tiksi seaport in Yakutia

MOSCOW, August 24. /TASS/. The Clean Arctic movement’s volunteers plan to remove up to 15 tonnes of scrap metal from the coastline near the Tiksi seaport in Yakutia, the project’s press center said on Monday. "Tiksi is one of the main Arctic ports in Russia. Volunteers from the All-Russian Student Corps of Rescuers have agreed happily to take part in this ecology expedition," the press service quoted the organization’s leader Evgeny Kozeyev, a member of the Russian Public Chamber, as saying. "All the volunteers have passed necessary training programs and know how to behave in complicated situations." Jointly with local volunteers, the team will remove scrap metal from the area near the Tiksi port and along the Bulunkan Bay coastline, where a few big companies used to have industrial facilities. The volunteers are expected to remove between 10 and 15 thousand tonnes of scrap metal and other waste. All the waste will be transported for further processing. At first, a barge will take it along the Lena River to the Nizhny Bestakh railway station. From there, it will be taken either to the Amur Region or to Cherepovets, depending on the contents. The expedition will open a big mission to clean the Tiksi settlement and other Yakut districts, which will continue until 2024. "Within the coming five years, we plan to remove about 100,000 tonnes of scrap metal, to organize for that necessary logistics facilities, especially in hard-to-reach districts," the press service quoted Yakutia’s Governor Aisen Nikolayev. "In late June, we finalized the project’s paperwork and formed a team, and today we already begin the practical part of it." The Clean Arctic project’s authors are Captain of the 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered Arctic class icebreaker Dmitry Lobusov and Gennady Antokhin, Captain on FESCO’s ships from 1982 to 2012. In early June, Captain Lobuzov suggested organizing a "big Arctic cleanup," hoping the joint effort would clean the Arctic territories from accumulated scrap metal and fuel. The program, presented at the Public Chamber on July 5, has been widely supported, including by the president’s ecology envoy Sergei Ivanov, the nature watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, volunteer and public organizations, the scientific community, and by the Arctic regions’ governors. Read more