World Cleanup Day 19 September 2020
On September 19, World Cleanup Day 2020, the world’s largest bottom-up civic movement to eliminate pollution and plastic waste, will take place. During the annual World Cleanup Day, millions of participants in 180 countries will clean streets, parks, beaches, forests, rivers, riverbanks and oceans of carelessly disposed waste and plastic waste.
Through the website www.worldcleanupday.org of the project executing agency in Germany “Let’s Do It! Germany e.V.”, local authorities, companies, associations, initiatives and private individuals can register their cleanup and find information on how to carry out cleanup operations safely.
“Our goal is not only to remove waste in public places, municipal and private companies in Germany have long been doing a good job here. We want to raise awareness of the extent to which we are filling and destroying our environment with plastic,” says Holger Holland, Project Manager Germany.
World Cleanup Day is a project of the citizens’ movement “Let’s Do It World!”, which was founded in Estonia in 2008, when 50,000 people together cleared the entire country of illegally disposed waste in one day. In 2019, 21 million people worldwide took part in World Cleanup Day and set a strong signal for a clean, healthy and plastic-free environment through their cleanups.
All places of action and contact persons in Germany can be found on the website of the sponsoring organization “Let’s Do It! Germany e.V.” under www.worldcleanupday.org.
Let’s talk about plastic waste
Did you know that every year 8 million tons of garbage are dumped into our oceans, 80% of it from landfill waste. It’s like dumping over 112,123 Boeings 737s into the world’s oceans… every year!
Waste has an evil quality, it doesn’t stay where you throw it away. As soon as the garbage starts to decompose, harmful chemicals and toxins are created. These migrate into the soil, then spread to water, air and our environment, which we all need for a healthy life. Polluted drinking water, the spread of disease, air pollution … these are all problems that are in some way due to waste production and a non-functioning recycling process.
Of course Germany is clean and has one of the best recycling systems, but waste is a worldwide problem. There are countless stories about the negative effects of waste on our world. In short, we care about waste because we cannot afford it.