Federation Council reviews results of Clean Arctic project
© Clean Arctic project

Federation Council reviews results of Clean Arctic project

A photo exhibition, The Arctic Needs People of Character, which is being held at the Federation Council, showcases the results of the Clean Arctic project. Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council Galina Karelova and Minister for the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic Alexei Chekunkov attended a ceremony to open the exhibition and award the project’s most effective volunteers. 

According to Galina Karelova, Clean Arctic is an important model project showing how the combination of a public initiative and the efforts of the government and businesses can help achieve an important objective, which is to remove waste from the Arctic.

“I want to note the high level of involvement of the state, businesses and the public in the environmental agenda of the Russian Arctic zone,” Karelova said. “The Clean Arctic project is becoming more ambitious and effective with each passing year as it is draws an ever-increasing number of people who cannot remain indifferent to the problem of Arctic pollution. I am sure that with a team of like-minded people the project has great future.”

Minister for the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic Alexei Chekunkov emphasized the importance of developing the volunteer movement and thanked the participants in the project.

“In the next decades, Russia will be developing its technology and its might, but all of this rests on the feelings, energy, enthusiasm and will that are being demonstrated by volunteers in the Arctic,” Alexei Chekunkov said. “The most important thing is that Clean Arctic is a volunteer project. There is no other order as important and demanding as one’s own will and an assignment given to oneself. I hope this readiness to work together from Murmansk to Anadyr, including with volunteers from countries that are friendly to Russia, will have a positive impact on our Arctic [zone]. Your efforts are really valuable as you are setting an example to such giants as the state and large companies. Your energy allows you to move mountains and, in the case of the project to clean the Arctic, these mountains of waste will be removed.”

More than 3,000 volunteers from various regions in Russia and foreign countries have collected about 5,000 metric tons of waste and prepared this amount for recycling over two years of expeditions to nine regions in the Arctic under the Clean Arctic public project. The scale of work was appraised by members of the Council for the Russian Far East, the Arctic and the Antarctic at the Federation Council, who at their meeting on that day discussed the issues of improving legislation to facilitate the delivery of supplies to the regions in Russia’s Extreme North.