Slovenia was cleaned and active in World Cleanup 2012

The Slovenian association Ecologists without Borders has, for the second time, organised an all-Slovenian voluntary campaign entitled `Let`s Clean Slovenia 2012`, in which almost a quarter of a million Slovenians participated. This 12% of the population united in cleaning wild dumping grounds all around Slovenia. This time, the project has expanded to a global level – namely, within the framework of the global initiative World Cleanup 2012.

The `Let`s clean Slovenia 2012` project is non-profit and non-political in nature and joins more than 1000 interested organisations, partners and active individuals; within a legal/formal framework, it functions under the auspices of the association Ecologists without Borders, which was established in March 2009 with the purpose of organising environmental projects – in terrain, this campaign mobilizes more than one tenth of all Slovenians. Until spring, volunteers all around Slovenia sought and verified wild dumping locations in a digital register that was created during last year`s project `Clean Slovenia in One Day!`

On 24 March 2012, the cleaning campaign removed municipal waste from these wild dumping grounds. Furthermore, they also cleaned the surroundings of schools, kindergartens, communities and walking trails.

Along with Portugal, Slovenia has begun a global cleaning campaign: `World Cleanup 2012` that will run from March to September 2012 – preparations are currently ongoing in more than 80 countries; the objective of the global project is to unite volunteers in at least 100 countries, who will remove more than 3 tonnes of waste from nature and help to create a global register of dumping grounds of illegally deposited waste. The `World Cleanup 2012` project consists of several one-day cleaning campaigns at the level of countries or large cities, which will be organised from 24 March to 25 September 2012. The idea for this project was born from a civil initiative: Let’s Do It! that united more than 50000 volunteers in Estonia, who removed 10000 tonnes of waste from nature all over the country in only five hours on 3 May 2008 (in normal circumstances, the state would require 3 years and more than 22 million EUR for such a project).

Video footage of the one-day cleaning of a state spread like a virus around the world wide web; moreover, 15 countries have already repeated the project. More than 2.4 million volunteers in total have already participated in cleaning campaigns, while the participation in individual countries represented from 4 to around 14% of the population. According to participation, Slovenia lead among all involved countries.

The main motivator and leader of the global movement Let`s Do It!, Rainer Nolvak, who also helped clean Ljubljana, said that Slovenia should teach other nations the magic of uniting so many people for the same objective. For instance, only 110,000 people cleaned in Portugal, which is only one percent of the Portuguese population. "Even if we don`t clean the world this year, the power and energy of volunteers will expand and motivate people, so that in the future, such campaigns will not be needed anymore," continued Nolvak.

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