ARKHANGELSK, November 8. /TASS/. The Clean Arctic project’s volunteers over two months collected 215 tonnes of scrap metal near the Malye Karmakuly weather station on the Yuzhny Island (the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago), the project’s press service said in a release.

"Clean Arctic’s volunteers have collected about 215 tonnes of scrap metal over two months of work on the Novaya Zemlya," the press service said.

The Professor Molchanov vessel (owned by the Russian meteorology service, Roshydromet) will take the team to Arkhangelsk. The five volunteers have spent two months on the Yuzhny Island. They collected the waste, which remained there since the times of the Arctic’s active development.

Around the weather station, which has been working for more than 120 years, the volunteers cut and packed barrels, used to transport lime and oil. Additionally, they have found a pressure chamber, tracks from all-terrain vehicles, telescopic antennas and a rudder blade from an old ship. "We have managed to achieve excellent results," the press service quoted the expedition’s leader Artyom Smolokurov as saying. "The main task now is to work jointly with the Ecostandard Group ecologists to offer methods to clean the Arctic territories, and also to put together a roadmap. Thus, in future we will be able to have systematic approaches to the work and to training future expedition participants."

The Clean Arctic project’s volunteers have collected more than 1,500 tonnes of waste across the Russian Arctic. The expeditions and large-scale cleanup missions have been organized in the Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Krasnoyarsk, Yamalo-Nenets, Komi, Karelia regions and in Yakutia. More than 3,000 people have filed applications to participate in the project. All of them will make a volunteer reserve for missions, due in 2022.

The project started in late July, after the Russian Public Chamber discussed an initiative of 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. The project is supported by the environment watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, the youth branch of the All-Russia People’s Front, the Russian Student Corps of Rescuers, the Clean Country association of waste managers, the Norilsk Nickel Company, Russian Railways, the Orion Company, and others.