MURMANSK, June 17. /TASS/. The Clean Arctic public environmental project proposed creating an international volunteer camp to clean up the northern territories. The initiative followed the first expedition to the Spitsbergen archipelago.
The mission's 15 volunteers from Russia and Belarus have returned to Murmansk onboard the Professor Molchanov scientific expedition vessel, the project's press service reported.
"Following the expedition, Russian volunteers voiced an initiative to create an international volunteer camp to bring together volunteers from all Arctic states to clean up jointly all the industrial waste: scrap metal, fuel barrels, abandoned machinery and dilapidated infrastructure facilities. That could be a permanent site where volunteers can work together to clean up the Arctic territories. This approach will make it possible to create unified protocols for collecting, dismantling and removing scrap metal in permafrost conditions, as well as to combine efforts on the Clean Arctic platform to coordinate works and to exchange industrial waste processing technologies," the press service said.
Industrial pollution in the Arctic is not just a Russian problem. According to open scientific reviews, including reports from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, significant amounts of scrap metal, abandoned fuel barrels, and dilapidated infrastructures still remain in territories of all Arctic states - Canada, the United States, and Norway. Most of that waste has been there from the Cold War time and from the active industrial development of the North.
"The Arctic is not the northern edge of any particular country. It is of global significance for the entire world - it is the common heritage of mankind, a fragile ecosystem, the planet's "weather kitchen." Its future depends not on political ambitions, but on our willingness to get united and restore the order. Ecology should be beyond politics. With an international volunteer camp we will move forward from words about sustainable development to real actions to cut environmental damage in this important territory," the press service quoted the Clean Arctic public environmental project's leader Andrey Nagibin as saying.
The project's first ever environmental mission to the Spitsbergen archipelago kicked off on June 2. Clean Arctic volunteers, together with corporate volunteers from the Arktikugol State Trust Company, cleaned up Russian villages. The first mission took place in Barentsburg, where the expedition members dismantled an old heating main that had been abandoned for almost 20 years. Further on, they prepared the first 30 tons of scrap metal in the Piramida settlement for shipment to the mainland for further processing.
About the project
The Clean Arctic Public Environmental Project has been cleaning the northern territories since 2021. Waste removal is a complex technological work, where the movement teams work carefully minding the Arctic nature. Over all seasons, the project's 9,923 volunteers have collected 22,045 tons of waste and cleaned 1,101 hectares of land. The project's general partner is the Rosatom State Corporation, and TASS is the general information partner.