Other events in Baltic States

 In total 17 million people from 158 countries across the globe took part in the World Cleanup Day held on Sept. 15, organizers said on Friday. 

According to final figures, 17 million people from 158 countries and territories took part in the initiative. The cleanup event was held also in the 11 countries which had to postpone their action dates due to weather-related or political challenges in mid-September.

The latest figures show that around 7.6 mln people took part in the cleanup in Indonesia, 3.7 mln in Sweden, 3 mln in Pakistan, 2.3 mln in Ukraine, 2 mln in Bulgaria, 1.7 mln in the United States, 1.6 mln in Latvia and Lithuania each, and 1.3 mln in Romania.

The manager of the World Cleanup Day, Eva Truuverk, said that more important than the figures is the fact that thanks to the cleanup event as well as other similar initiatives people have started to ask themselves whether it's really wise to use things for only 20 seconds.   

"Using single-use plastic food and drink containers, plastic bags, cotton buds and other similar items is too big a waste of resource. When a single-use item like this ends up in the environment instead of the thrash can, it becomes environmental pollution which finds its way back on our dining table in the form of micro-plastic. It is more than evident that all of humankind must critically review their consumption habits because we have no planet B," Truuverk said.

She said the organizers believe that the World Cleanup Day provided a positive impetus for changing habits, and all these millions of people who turned up to clean their country of waste will become new champions of solving the global litter problem and role models  who start shaping the attitudes and behavior of very many others in the future. 

The World Cleanup Day is getting a follow-on in the Keep it Clean Plan, which will be discussed in-depth along with the further collaborative steps together with the Let’s do it! country leaders at the 8th annual Clean World Conference, held in Tallinn on Jan. 24-27, 2019. Among other things, the Tallinn conference will decide about when the next World Cleanup Day will be held and which country will be the lead nation of the initiative then.

The Keep It Clean Plan, released on Sept. 16, embeds the principles of the Zero Waste strategy and concludes with recommended actions for businesses, governments, citizens and NGOs to implement specific steps to deal with the global mismanaged waste crisis.

World Cleanup Day is propelled by the civic movement Let’s do it! World, which has been initiating cleanup actions across 169 countries throughout the last decade, with now over 36 million volunteers taking part in total. Let’s do it! World has also proven to be a movement of peace and bridge-building.