Russian volunteers collect more than 100 tons of scrap metal in Arctic
TOMSK, August 13. /TASS/. A team of volunteers collected more than 100 tons of scrap metal during a two-week expedition to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region's Tazovsky District, press service of the Tomsk State University said.
"We have wrapped up work at the Oka station (a tropospheric radio relay station in the Tazovsky District - TASS). We are in good mood, very tired. We have collected more than 100 tons of waste," said Vladislav Firsov, a volunteer and the university's student. To him, the mission was the fourth expedition to the Arctic.
A team of 17 men spent two weeks dismantling old buildings, removing metal and fuel barrels. The mission was organized by Green Arctic.
The Oka tropospheric radio relay station is part of the North tropospheric communications system, developed in the 1950s. The system was used to ensure reliable long-range communication and to enhance the country's defense capability in the Arctic and other hard-to-reach areas. Nowadays, tropospheric communication lines have been replaced by satellite systems, but they played an important role in telecommunications in the mid-20th century. The Oka station, like the other 50 stations of the system, was closed in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the historical pollution still remains there.
The Green Arctic inter-regional organization was established in 2014 to attract volunteers to cleanup missions in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region's Arctic. So far, 400 volunteers from 12 countries have surveyed 500 hectares of and manually collected about 2,800 tons of scrap metal. The organization's volunteers have completed cleanup of the Bely and Vilkitsky Islands.
