TASS, August 26. Volunteers of the Clean Arctic movement collected on the coastline of Yakutia’s Tiksi sea port more than 300 tonnes of scrap metal, the project’s press center reported on Wednesday.
"In Tiksi, under the Clean Arctic project, the volunteers have collected for further processing more than 300 tonnes of scrap metal and 250 cubic meters of waste," the report reads. "Local residents, personnel of the regional administration and companies, and even the military, have joined the volunteers."
Within just one day, more than a hundred people collected about 70 tonnes of scrap metal and 200 cubic meters of waste from Bulunkan Bay’s coastline, where formerly a few big companies used to have industrial facilities.
"On the first day of our expedition, we met the local residents and volunteers, who wanted to join the Clean Arctic project," the Clean Arctic project office’s leader Alexander Markov said. "We offered to them special outfits and organized safety training. Today, those volunteers have been cleaning the Tiksi coastline jointly with the main team of volunteers."
The collected scrap metal will be processed. A barge will take it along the Lena River to the Nizhny Bestyakh railway station, where it will be reloaded onto a train going to the final destination - the Amurstal plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The biggest share of collected wood was used for the fires, which were a part of the cleanup celebration.
In addition to Tiksi, the volunteers will work in the tundra, where they are expected to collect another 300-500 tonnes of scrap metal. The Clean Arctic expedition has started a big mission to clean up the Tiksi and other Arctic settlements in Yakutia. The mission will continue to 2024.
About 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.