Clean Arctic volunteers begin ecology mission on Taimyr

MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/. The Krasnoyarsk Region is the first location to welcome the Clean Arctic Project’s volunteers. On Tuesday, 30 people from the country’s 13 regions began an ecology mission on the Yenisei coastline, the project’s press service said. "It is a big movement to clean the Arctic," the press service quoted Igor Kosyukevich of the All-Russia People’s Front, as saying. "The project will work in the Russian Federation’s eight Arctic regions. The first group begins working on the Taimyr Peninsula. The participants are different people: some have experience in emergency situations response, some worked here last year on the Ambarnaya River. Many have worked in Yalta, the Crimea, some are here for the first time. Our task is to clean the Pshenichnyi Brook, which falls into the Yenisei, and the adjacent areas. I hope the Dudunka administration and the Norilsk Nickel Company will join us." Volunteers in the first group are mostly students, as well as some corporate volunteers and the locals. A few days later, the group will come to the Shchyuchya River - another area of contamination and accumulated unattended vehicles and equipment. The youth division of the All-Russia People’s Front will monitor other unattended vehicles in the region - to register them and to present all the information to local authorities. Another cleanup area would be Lake Dolgoye. Clean Arctic project The Clean Arctic project’s authors are Captain of the 50 Let Pobedy 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, scientific community and by the Arctic regions’ governors. Photo by Denis Kozhevnikov/TASS Read more