TASS, September 16. The Clean Arctic project’s volunteers will collect and prepare for transportation 300 tonnes of scrap metal in Yakutia’s far-away village, the project’s organizers said. The collected metal in spring will be transported for further smelting.
"Clean Arctic’s volunteers will be working in Yakutia’s far-away village for one month. The team has started working in Saiylyk (the Ust-Yansky District). The task is to collect and prepare for further transportation 300 tonnes of scrap metal: frames of vehicles, metal channels, pipes, etc.," the organizers said. "The collected scrap metal will be transported for further smelting in spring, when roads become stable. We have been negotiating a company, licensed to handle, store, process and sell non-ferrous metal scrap."
The mission in Saiylyk has been organized by the RIK Group of Companies’ tin-producing division. The enterprise has chosen volunteers and equipped them. Yakutia’s First Deputy Minister on Development of the Arctic and the North’s Peoples’ Affairs Sergey Neustroyev stressed that support and active involvement are examples for other companies, which are to have the Arctic cleaned much quicker. "The Yanolovo Company has joined the chain of Clean Arctic’s federal projects in Yakutia," the project’s organizers quoted him as saying. "I would like to stress that on the cleaned territory we will make a workout area for the local residents."
A member of Clean Arctic’s federal headquarters Andrey Nagibin said Yakutia had been supporting actively the project’s events and missions. Despite the harsh weather conditions, the complicated logistics, there are companies, ready to assist. Yakutia’s Governor Aisen Nikolayev is the leader of the regional headquarters. "There is still much work to do, the remaining Soviet waste is still thousands of tonnes," Andrey Nagibin said. "However, with the mood we have, I do not doubt we will free the Arctic from the accumulated damage."
A two-week mission in the Ust-Yansky District’s Ust-Kuiga is due next week. In that village the federal project’s volunteers will also collect tonnes of scrap metal and construction waste.
About project
Clean Arctic is a large-scale project to clean the Arctic territory from the waste, accumulated since the Soviet times. 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, are the project’s authors.
Clean Arctic has developed into a platform, which unites public and volunteer organizations, scientists, officials and businesses. The project’s partners are Norilsk Nickel, Rosatom, PhosAgro, and RZD.