Especially a lot of plastic, but also cans, cigarette butts and other junk. About 30,000 volunteers, including eight-year-old Sophie Lopers from Smilde, cleared waste today. They participated in the National Clean-up Day with the gripping tongs and a garbage bag.
“Plastic is not good for the animals”, Sophie explains her cleaning campaign RTV Drenthe. “If a piece of waste has an orange color, rabbits might think it’s a carrot. And then they die if they eat the plastic.”
The National Clean-up Day is an annual campaign by Nederland Schoon and the Plastic Soup Foundation, but had to take place in an adapted form for the second time in a row due to corona. So no local residents who massively clean their neighborhood, but groups of two who try to remove as much litter as possible.
“In the years before, we also had 200,000 participants,” says Helene van Zutphen, director of Nederland Schoon. “Now we asked people to only take to the streets with their own ‘corona circle’. Fortunately, a lot of children participated again this year, which was nice to see. They can also learn a lot from it.”
A striking number of masks
Some 2,800 liters of waste have been collected in Lelystad alone, reports Flevoland broadcaster. According to one participant, a striking number of masks have been found there this year. In Zierikzee, a group of volunteer lanes run into a broken toilet bowl and a fluorescent bar. “I will report this to the municipality,” says one of the volunteers Zeeland broadcaster. “They should pick it up. Otherwise my bag cannot be carried anymore of course.”
Around 45,000 clean-up operations were held throughout the country. The litter collectors took photos of their collected waste and posted them on the Litterati app. This keeps track of where the waste has been found, and possibly from which brand the waste originates. For example, companies that participate in the clean-up day, such as McDonald’s and Pathé, can use the data to see where litter comes from and accumulates. “They can then go more specifically to those places to clean up there,” said Van Zutphen.
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