On Sakhalin, the Ministry of Housing and Utilities has summed up the results of a campaign to clean up unauthorized landfills. In total, in 2020, 300 thousand cubic meters of garbage were found and eliminated on the islands. If you collect this garbage in boxes 1 meter wide, deep and high and put on top of each other, you can get to the Earth’s ionosphere.
General cleaning of the islands started in the spring of last year. Local residents with drones were brought in to help. They looked for landfills in hard-to-reach places and received money for it. A lot of messages were sent both to the Sakhalin portal, online and to the social network of government agencies. Sakhalin residents shared coordinates and photographs of contaminated sites.
But they themselves did not sit idle. The most proactive organized volunteer clean-ups and collected garbage along the seashore and in the forests. As a result, 607 illegal dumps were liquidated in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk alone. In 2021, the region will continue to work in this direction.
“I can easily believe that we have collected so much garbage,” said Ekaterina from Sakhalin. – There were terrible dumps even in tourist places. Go to the Uyunovsky waterfall, to the beach in Aniva, even to Vestochka. There are now bottles, now rusty parts from cars. It will be more pleasant to walk next year. And it’s not so embarrassing to call tourists.