DUDINKA /Krasnoyarsk Region/, August 11. /TASS/. The Arctic cleanup mission will continue not only within the term of Russia’s chairing the Arctic Council, but until the North’s nine regions are cleaned fully. This may require about ten years, the Clean Arctic’s representative Andrei Nagibin told TASS.
"Russia is chairing the Arctic Council, and we plan anyway this cleanup for two years," he said. "We do this voluntarily, without any obligations."
"The waste has accumulated there for almost a hundred years, and thus we need at least ten years to clean everything," he added. "We will continue the cleanup until everything is removed."
In 2021, on the Taimyr Peninsula, the volunteers have cleaned 30 km of the Yenisei coastal line, demolished buildings of the former fish plant. A barge will deliver collected scrap metal to Krasnoyarsk for further processing. The wood from demolished buildings will be used as firewood for the locals. The works in the Krasnoyarsk Region will continue to August 15.
"We remove from here what’s left from the country’s collapse," Igor Kosyukevich of the All-Russia People’s Front told TASS. "The accumulated damage is tonnes of metal and reinforced concrete that have been lying here since the Soviet era."
"Of course, it is impossible to do everything by the hands of volunteers alone," he said. "We need equipment and a systematic approach."
"The volunteers work primarily to draw public attention to the problem of cleaning up the Arctic," he stressed. "We really hope that various companies and organizations will participate in the project. This story is public already. The locals come to us, prompting places that require our attention."
The Clean Arctic project will cover nine Arctic regions. The volunteers continue cleaning missions in the Yamalo-Nenets and Arkhangelsk regions. Within a few days they plan to head for Chukotka, Komi, Karelia and Yakutia. Next destinations will be the Murmansk and Nenets regions.
Clean Arctic project
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 Sergey Ivanov, the nature watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, volunteer and public organizations, scientific community and by the Arctic regions’ governors.